Instant Infrastructure: Infrastructure at the Speed of Business

Enterprises are under increasing pressure to deliver new digital products and services at an unprecedented rate to meet the needs and expectations of internal users and customers. Recently, many enterprises have focused their attention on accelerating development and deployment cycles, but these efforts will be wasted if the infrastructure is not ready or able to support them. Gartner believes that this issue is one of the major trends affecting infrastructure and operations this year. The accelerating pace of technology change provides IT leaders with tremendous opportunities (and pressures) to align with business priorities," the report states. . Gartner and others are beginning to see SOWs and purchase agreements for infrastructure and services that list next to each item Expected delivery times. This is in line with IT's requirement for speed of response to business needs. This issue has become more pronounced due to the disruptions associated with the outbreak. Deloitte's recently released Technology Industry Outlook 2022 points to the lingering impact of the new crown epidemic in accelerating the pace of business. When the epidemic began two years ago, it forced many companies into the future, rapidly accelerating their digital transformation. The speed needed to support this transformation and the need to proceed requires, as Deloitte puts it, taking cloud computing to new heights. As more companies adopt cloud computing and service-based IT to drive innovation and transformation, everything-as-a-service will be key to the digital transformation, especially for new solutions and business models," the report says. Delivering infrastructure at the speed of business There are several ways for IT departments to deliver infrastructure in a timely manner to meet the speed of modern business requirements. Traditionally, enterprises have moved to cloud services, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). IaaS provides the raw infrastructure (servers, instances, storage, interconnectivity, etc.) to run development and operational environments. But PaaS adds tools, applications and databases. By providing all these things as a service, enterprises can focus on its application. People are exploring other options. NaaS is the logical result of moving many business processes to the cloud. It provides an all-in-one solution that typically includes equipment, software, orchestration and management, with a fixed recurring fee, and the service is customized to meet the specific business requirements of the user. Another relatively new market entrant is "everything as a service" (EaaS). Compared to PaaS, EaaS, often called IaaS Plus, extends traditional infrastructure into the application development arena. eaaS includes all the code and setup as well as the infrastructure and software to run an application. EaaS can be used in a production environment as well as for development. The fascinating aspect of EaaS is that the service usually allows companies to choose how to access the service for developers and operations teams. This may include access through a web portal, a command line interface, or directly through a developer's CI/CD tool. This capability is especially important today given the way applications are developed and maintained. Along the lines of "out with the old, in with the new," some enterprises are rediscovering composable infrastructures. A composable infrastructure leverages a pool of physical or virtual infrastructure that can be configured as needed. A defined infrastructure pool can contain computing, networking and storage resources. A composable infrastructure is often thought of as an on-premises environment. Now, however, there is interest in extending its benefits to cloud and hybrid environments. To do this requires a high level of process and automation maturity, coupled with a firm understanding of resource requirements. The common theme in all of these approaches is that they are designed to help enterprises act quickly when opportunities arise or new applications or services are needed.