Cloud complexity compounds with a new paradigm for remote work infrastructure

A blog post by Diana Kearns-Manolatos, senior manager, Center for Integrated Research at Deloitte.

As companies look to cut through cloud complexity, there are three key infrastructure considerations to keep in mind:

• Managing business continuity risk has become a key focus area. The inability to access physical data centers created new business continuity concerns that will extend far beyond the pandemic. Organizations have realized that physical location risk can be offset by cloud data centers. Many organizations were already in the process of virtualizing their data centers. The continued evolution of this trend involves building common data services and putting new strategies in place to manage distributed data.
• Addressing infrastructure complexity is another challenge organizations are facing. The increasingly complex IT landscape, including digital, mobile, IOT, and edge solutions, has exploded in recent years. Working at home turned the dial for many organizations toward a much larger volume and distribution of mobile, VPN, SaaS, and cloud solutions in use—taking that complex IT environment to the next level. This catalyst has created new opportunities to modernize legacy infrastructure with more flexible cloud, microservices, and API architectures with improved full-stack orchestration. In this way, organizations can not only aim for an effective multicloud strategy, but can also truly build a robust hybrid multicloud solution. Organizations looking to take an inventory don’t understand their device composition and complexity footprint, including endpoints under management. This orchestration must happen across system types, aided by a clear management plan.
• The rise of AIOps is another trend that is clearly underway. In recent years, IT operations in general have extended to include CloudOps. Now, organizations are looking to integrate AIOps into their processes for more reactive and predictive monitoring across the cloud operating model. As the IT team learns to work in a more distributed environment, infusing AI into operations to provide greater resiliency is a trend worth watching.

Beyond these challenges, this complex IT environment and movement toward the cloud brings with it new security concerns, as well as potential solutions. We will discuss them in the next article in this series.

This is the second post in a four-part series on the future work infrastructure. To read the first post, click here.

To read the related article on Deloitte Insights, click here.