Top 5 infrastructure trends to know about in 2020

Updating disaster recovery plans, protecting data, and implementing automation are some infrastructure trends businesses should focus on in 2020, according to Gartner. Tom Merritt offers more details.

At its IT Infrastructure, Operations, & Cloud Strategies Conference 2019, Gartner group projected some of the trends in digital infrastructure expected to be meaningful in 2020. Let’s look at the five infrastructure trends you should know about.

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Make sure your disaster recovery plan is updated. Is your infrastructure spread out through colocation centers, cloud services, and edge locations? Is your disaster recovery plan describing an on-prem mainframe? OK, it’s probably not that bad, but you can prevent a lot of availability issues by making sure your disaster recovery plan includes all your cloud service providers’ redundancy capabilities.
Speaking of that, where’s your data? Gartner estimates that by 2022, 60% of enterprise IT infrastructures will focus on centers of data, not data centers. Prepare now to protect your data whether it’s stored on-prem, at the edge, or in the cloud.
You might need someone in charge of automation. Most places are automating some things and, as the tools and services multiply, it’s not hard for even a small to medium-sized company to find it’s duplicating efforts and processes. Companies need to go from ad hoc to having a view of the proper automation strategy for their business.
You may be sensing a pattern here. A single product becomes an industry that suddenly makes everything much more complex to keep track of later. You can get ahead of the next example of this with the Internet of Things (IoT). I bet you have a few projects supplied more than a few vendors. Get your infrastructure and ops team onboard with IoT implementations now before it grows hard to keep track of.
Get involved in any low-code efforts from the start. Low code is great at offloading some of the simpler app creation to business units, rather than taking up resources from central IT. This empowers the unit and can be very efficient. But when service on those apps is needed central IT will be called in. Know what services are being used, and help educate units on best practices. You’ll thank yourself later.

There are all kinds of other trends like hybrid digital infrastructure management, distributed cloud, and more in the Gartner report. Hopefully, this gets your head wrapped around preparing for some for the shifts in infrastructure, so you don’t have to put in late shifts fixing your infrastructure.