Willie Schoeman | Managing Director | Technology | Cloud First Lead | Accenture Africa | mail me |
As Marc Andreessen famously said, software is eating the world. And this is particularly true in infrastructure engineering.
Technology continues to evolve and accelerate, and traditional approaches are increasingly limiting enterprises’ ability to adapt, innovate and compete – especially the shift to infrastructure-as-code, creating substantial new opportunities for rapid and agile innovation.
The cloud continuum’s push
Cloud has never played a more significant role than it does today – helping companies deliver profitable growth, create innovative experiences, and operate responsibly and sustainably. But one of the biggest misconceptions about the cloud? That it somehow makes IT infrastructure less critical – and nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, infrastructure has never been more crucial for the success of a business.
At the same time, enterprises recognise that ‘cloud’ does not simply mean public cloud. The evolution of the cloud continuum requires organisations to dynamically balance public, private, hybrid, co-location, multi-cloud, and edge to support the ever-changing needs of the business. Winning companies architect their infrastructure for competitive advantage across an expanding array of capabilities.
Consider the distributed nature of today’s workspaces and workloads. In the past, an enterprise typically had a limited number of sites and a finite number of connections to worry about. Now, connectivity is required anywhere and everywhere.
For a large global organisation, this can mean hundreds of thousands of new locations needing continuous cloud connectivity, which dramatically increases the need for modern enterprise networks. These networks must meet a broad and rapidly changing set of business requirements and provide seamless, secure connectivity to data, applications and platforms.
A renaissance in infrastructure engineering
In the worst cases, IT performance can deteriorate in the cloud. Despite the world-leading infrastructure, high-quality assets, and the more democratised innovation you get from the cloud providers, an enterprise can still struggle to match the organisation’s performance level in its on-premises data centre.
Why? Because the infrastructure and processes, and the skills supporting them, aren’t able to keep pace with new digital business requirements. This need to rearchitect for the cloud is why we say there’s a renaissance in infrastructure critical to the modern enterprise. This renaissance is also evident in the availability, sophistication and scalability infrastructure can now deliver.
It is now the single biggest differentiator for a digital business. It is one of the key reasons the digital natives have had such vast and disruptive success. Modern IT infrastructure enables enterprises to do new things, create new products, develop new offerings, enter new markets, and conduct further experiments at a previously unthinkable pace.
Things have changed. Infrastructure engineers are now at the centre of designing and architecting the new systems upon which exceptional experiences are built. Because the work is increasingly tied to strategic business objectives, it’s more interesting, iterative and collaborative.
Thanks to a renewed emphasis on infrastructure capabilities and hybrid architectures, infrastructure engineering is again a place to build a long-term career in enterprise IT. IT leaders are ready to create the environment and invest in the training infrastructure engineers need to thrive in the future.
Typically, modern infrastructure is one that:
- It is consumable, automated and ready to support DevOps.
- It is architected for placement of workloads and data into a ‘landing sone’ best suited to its needs – whether that’s a public cloud, private cloud, legacy data centres or edge.
- It is supported by an enterprise network that is seamlessly integrated, secure and software-driven, i.e., infrastructure-as-code.
- Addresses the workplace’s human, physical and digital aspects, reducing friction and getting new insights to workers at the right time, in the right way, in the right place, via the suitable device.
- Includes the ability to manage and enable the estate across existing capabilities, technologies and services.
Time to get serious about infrastructure
Not every organisation may choose to expand into the cloud continuum, but keep in mind that you still need to manage your infrastructure and your people in a cloud-like way even if you decide not to move significantly into the cloud. Otherwise, your performance will suffer, and your ability to innovate will be limited.
For those who choose to exploit the transformative opportunities offered by the cloud continuum, their landscape must be engineered to support it. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, but a few core elements need to be in place if you’re to succeed in tapping into the value of the continuum.
Alan Kay’s much-quoted view is that ‘people serious about software should make their hardware’. But the cloud, of course, is somewhat different. You don’t need to make or even own your hardware. But you do need to rearchitect it to capture the transformative opportunities created by the cloud continuum and the digital economy.
If companies are serious about software, they should be serious about infrastructure. Since every company is a software company, this means everyone.
