Tag: Willie Schoeman

Managing a cloud estate can be a culture shock. The traditional operating mode centred around buying, running and decommissioning physical hardware over multi-year cycles is replaced by a need to continuously manage and optimise capacity, consumption, cost, performance, and business innovation.

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 saying goes, 'the more advanced technology gets, the quicker it becomes more advanced'. IT infrastructure is changing rapidly. Complexity is on the rise. Digital talent is scarce. Infrastructure is becoming code, and the cloud is evolving into a continuum of technologies.

An entire continuum of cloud solutions now exists across the organisation, spanning public and private clouds, applications, data, edge devices, and Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity. They were combined with the need for flexible 'anywhere, everywhere' access.

While the general opinion by industry observers is that organisations will virtualise the majority of applications and workloads and move to the public cloud – with the public cloud representing up to 80% of companies' infrastructure footprints – most businesses have pivoted to a hybrid approach in response to the need for more balance.

For those who survived the initial shock of the COVID-19 crisis, the question is: Now what? Since there is no going back to business as usual, it is time for companies to turn the page and concentrate on planning for mid- to long-term priorities.

Too often IT departments or technologists work to uncover the needs of the organisation in silos, building or buying a new tool, rolling it out and training business units on the new technology. With technology democratisation, everyone can be an innovator. It adds a grassroots layer previously missing from enterprise innovation.

When we published our 2020 Technology Vision trends report in February, COVID-19 was not yet a global pandemic. Now, everything has changed. This pandemic is the greatest challenge the world has faced in decades, yet rather than slowing innovation, it is amplifying it to historic levels.