Blog 2022 IT Infrastructure Trends to Support Innovation

At Insight, we often say that infrastructure is the foundation for transformation. Without modern infrastructure, you can’t achieve modern business objectives.

According to the results of “The Path to Digital Transformation: Where IT Leaders Stand in 2022,” an Insight-commissioned IDG survey, nearly 90% of business and IT leaders agree that IT modernization will have a transformative or significant impact on their organization’s long-term growth.

Here are the infrastructure strategies that business and IT leaders are now adopting in 2022 — to propel their organizations to the next era.

1. Workload alignment

There are almost infinite types of IT environments, with elements of cloud, on-premises, hybrid and edge all coming together to form snowflake architectures unique to each organization.

But not every arrangement is best. Getting strategic about your architecture is key. In fact, our survey shows 72% of IT and business leaders are evaluating optimal/best-fit platforms for infrastructure and applications.

Some of these organizations may be in the early stages of a cloud-native journey, taking a closer look at application dependencies, criticalities, costs and other factors to ensure they’re moving in the right direction. Others may be further down the hybrid path, wanting to make better use of spend, IT or developer resources. In any case, workload alignment is a crucial tool for ensuring infrastructure is enabling the innovation and growth that a business demands.

2. Modern security approaches

Sustainable innovation — innovation that makes it out of the sandbox, off the whiteboard and into users’ lives — must come with proper protections. In order to create the products and solutions that will change tomorrow, businesses are starting to prioritize security today.

For 67% of surveyed organizations, ensuring the protection of critical infrastructure with modern security approaches is an initiative that is in progress or underway (while another 27% have plans to address it).

Alongside critical infrastructure security measures, 65% of those surveyed say they’ve begun to improve observability across WAN, data center, cloud and beyond.

Those of us in the IT and tech industries know all too well how important — and daunting — security is. Gaps are pervasive. Security talent is difficult to find and retain. Security environments are increasingly complicated.

Despite the challenges, there are many ways that any organization can strengthen its security strategy and make critical infrastructure even a little more secure to better protect the business’ end users, data and its ability to continually reinvent its offerings.

3. Legacy technology modernization

At their best, archaic or traditional systems keep businesses behind the technology curve — and the competition.

Companies are well aware of this: Our survey shows that 89% of respondents are planning on or are currently in the process of modernizing legacy technology. This includes shifting or deploying workloads in cloud, hybrid cloud, and multicloud model adoption.

Businesses undertaking such initiatives need to develop strong and actionable strategies. Considering critical questions upfront is key: Why certain infrastructure? Why a specific cloud over another? Why are we doing this, or what are the intended objectives? And will our planned activities help us achieve them?

4. Increasing use of As a Service delivery models

The allure of public cloud lies in its ability to provide scale at speeds that developers need to drive the business forward. Another big draw of public cloud is its pay-as-you-go cost structure.

Organizations that either can’t or don’t want to go all-in with public cloud are generally arriving at hybrid models that deliver flexibility. As a Service takes that up a notch — providing cloud-like consumption and other similar attributes of public cloud, like scalability on demand and pre-built architectures for certain workloads, but in the form of on-premises infrastructure.

We found that 65% of organizations have begun to or expect to increase use of As a Service models over the next 12 months. We may expect to see interest levels pique even further as more key players ramp up As a Service offerings to meet market demand.

Support for your initiatives

If your organization is setting its sights on modernization like the majority of our survey respondents, you’ve got big goals and lots of work to accomplish in the months ahead.

Insight is helping businesses refine their modernization strategies. We’re developing, implementing and managing the infrastructure solutions that enable transformation — and we’re excited to see what the future holds for businesses everywhere. If you’re ready to drive meaningful change, we can help.

To discover more from the Insight-commissioned IDG survey, “The Path to Digital Transformation: Where IT Leaders Stand in 2022.” Click here to see further resources.