Digital infrastructure platform

Welcome to the digital economy

 

Digital workplaces, platforms, and products are seriously testing the boundaries of conventional IT infrastructure and operations. Companies that want to digitize their processes and business models are making new demands on IT performance, flexibility, and functionality. The path from legacy IT to a digital infrastructure platform looks long and complicated. Whereas many applications have the continuity and architecture of conventional IT environments, innovative digital workloads have quite diverse requirements, which the latest cloud and microservices architectures cover efficiently. In practice, legacy IT and digital infrastructure have much to “learn” from each other. Legacy IT can be run on cloud native standards, while the digital infrastructure platform can be tweaked to achieve the stability levels of traditional IT architecture. That makes the hybrid cloud the most important standard for IT operations – at least for the time being.

 

For decision-makers, an integrated digital infrastructure platform means tackling a number of challenges both at the technology and the business level. These include ensuring stability and mastering the overarching management of public clouds (some of which have been launched without fully developed tools), and, most importantly, expanding companies’ existing skill sets and operations models for cloud and cloud native. The main thing that companies transitioning to a hybrid digital infrastructure platform need is a clear structure. The transition can be frictionless if applications are assigned to the various infrastructure variants, and if responsibilities and tasks are clearly allocated. When it comes to practical deployment, decision-makers should think in scenarios. That is the best way to record and plan the change requirements for IT architecture, and to define the skill gaps and new operational concepts.

Learn more about the win & fail factors of hybrid infrastructures in the Cloud Native era in our free strategy paper, which Crisp Research has created in cooperation with T-Systems. You can also read about how the hybrid cloud will develop in the future and what scenarios companies might expect during this maturity phase.