The Data Center Is Dead, and Digital

Infrastructures Emerge
Published: 13 April 2018 ID: G00354861

Analyst(s): David Cappuccio

Digital infrastructure architecture won't be based on current topologies, but

will be global in scale, driven by business requirements. I&O leaders must
focus on enabling rapid deployment of business services and deploying
workloads to the right locations, for the right reasons, at the right price.

Impacts
■ Workload placement in a digital infrastructure is based on business need, not constrained by
physical location.
■ I&O leaders must build an ecosystem of service partners to help enable scalable, agile
infrastructures.
■ Distributed digital infrastructure management will provide the tools for I&O to monitor and
manage any asset or process, anywhere, at any time, enabling a successful transition to digital
business.
■ The movement to digital infrastructure will result in radically increased complexity for I&O so
staff must be retrained, with a focus on versatility.

Recommendations
I&O leaders focused on planning and enabling an infrastructure delivery strategy should start with
the following primary recommendations:

■ Make a plan based on business needs at the application or workload level, and not just based
on the physical infrastructure.
■ Leverage your partner ecosystem to enable an agile, flexible infrastructure that is responsive to
new business initiatives.
■ Integrate diverse platform choices together into a unified solution to allow market advances,
and advantages, to be deployed quickly and easily.
 ■ Develop staff versatility, complementing vertical expertise with the additional capabilities
needed to support hybrid infrastructures.

Strategic Planning Assumption

By 2025, 80% of enterprises will have shut down their traditional data center, versus 10% today.

Analysis
Infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders today face a daunting challenge. The IT they have known
for decades is changing — radically. IT's primary function will be to enable the business to be more
agile, to enter new markets more quickly, to deliver services closer to the customer, and to position
specific workloads based on business, regulatory and geopolitical impacts. The role of the
traditional data center will be relegated to that of a legacy holding area, dedicated to very specific
services than cannot be supported elsewhere, or supporting those systems that are most
economically efficient on-premises. As interconnect services, cloud providers, the Internet of Things
(IoT), edge services and SaaS offerings continue to proliferate, the rationale to stay in a traditional
data center topology will have limited advantages. This is not an overnight shift, but an evolutionary
change in thinking in how we deliver services to our customers and to the business.

The drivers behind this shift to a distributed digital infrastructure are many, but the key impacts to
consider are shown in Figure 1.

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 Figure 1. Impacts and Top Recommendations for Emerging Digital Infrastructure

Source: Gartner (April 2018)

Impacts and Recommendations

Workload Placement Will Become the Key Driver of Digital Infrastructure Delivery
Traditionally, when business units requested new applications (or services), many IT organizations
would first ask themselves, "How can we build this application to fit within our architecture?" While
this strategy has worked for completely IT-controlled, on-premises environments, it becomes self-
constraining over time, as the architecture may not adapt quickly to evolving business requirements.

Many organizations that are developing digital infrastructure delivery strategies are wrestling with
the issue of cloud adoption. Successful I&O leaders are focused on business value, rather than
cloud adoption, as a goal. I&O leaders are therefore beginning to build IT strategies with a focus on
their application portfolio, rather than on the physical infrastructure, moving away from traditional IT-
architecture-driven decisions toward a service-driven strategy.

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 With the recent increase in business-driven IT initiatives, often outside of the traditional IT budget,
there has been a rapid growth in implementations of IoT solutions, edge compute environments and
"nontraditional" IT. There has also been an increased focus on customer experience with outward-
facing applications, and on the direct impact of poor customer experience on corporate reputation.
This outward focus is causing many organizations to rethink placement of certain applications
based on network latency, customer population clusters and geopolitical limitations (for example,
the EU's General Data Protection Regulation [GDPR] or regulatory restrictions).

Recommendations:

■ Develop specific business rules for rationalizing application placement (see "Developing a
Practical Hybrid Workload Placement Strategy"). These rules focus on areas such as
compliance, data protection, security, latency, resiliency, reputation, service continuity, location,
availability and performance. They become guidelines for determining where current and future
workloads belong, and also become the baseline for developing an overall infrastructure
upgrade strategy. This is not a migration strategy, because some workloads may not move at
all. Rather, it's a strategy designed to optimize business impacts, and not just I&O costs.
■ Replace older workloads with an "as a service" offering where appropriate. The trend of
migrating back-office workloads toward SaaS adoption continues, but technology procurement
leaders must evaluate and assess migration risks in order to achieve maximum benefit. Picking
the wrong provider or moving the wrong workload can increase operating costs and risks,
rather than decreasing them.

An Ecosystem Will Be Required to Enable Scalable, Agile Infrastructures

The new digital ecosystem can be homegrown, and developed in conjunction with key service
providers. The deployment of this distributed digital infrastructure begins by agreeing on the
business-related benefits that can be attained for each application workload and its associated
data. These benefits can include reduced latency, improved customer experience, enhanced
corporate reputation, stronger service continuity, geodiversity, improved compliance or mandated
data location residency requirements. When answering these questions, take into account not only
what the IT infrastructure can deliver today, but also what is available on the market that you can
leverage — either colocation, hosting or cloud. More importantly, ask how a service partner can be
leveraged to provide you enhanced services when needed.

An emerging trend in the colocation market has been the introduction of enhanced services that go
well beyond traditional power, floor space and support services (see "Colocation-Based
Interconnection Will Serve as the 'Glue' for Advanced Digital Business Applications"). These
enhanced services include carrier neutrality, cloud-enabled services, access to multiple cloud
services via secure networks, cross-connects to partners on the same premises, or interconnect
fabrics to other sites or services. By using these fabrics, enterprise customers could have access to
many different providers and services and be able to switch between or swap services when
contracts or performance requirements change. Moving between providers today is not a simple
task. Expect enhanced colocation providers to offer a software-defined networking (SDN) layer
above these fabrics, thus providing a seamless mechanism for moving between services for their
customers. In this manner, colocation providers could become an integral part of your digital

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 infrastructure, so the development of clearly defined SLAs, key performance indicators (KPIs) and
contractual obligations is imperative.

As digital business evolves, the need for geodiversity is evolving as well. Data location, regulatory
requirements (such as GDPR) and customer requirements (such as low latency) all may drive the
need for workloads to be accessible from multiple locations. A partner ecosystem that supports
strong interconnection services can be a key enabler for these workloads.

Data center interconnection is a model in which discrete assets within a multitenant data center are
connected to each other directly and in a peer-to-peer fashion. These connections may be as
simple as intrasite cross-connects, but can allow data-center-based assets to horizontally connect
to multiple carriers, cloud providers, peers and service providers.

Recommendations:

■ Combine interconnection with high-speed enterprise access to the multitenant data center, and
include enterprise assets (such as compute, storage and networking) located in the multitenant
data center, to bring the enterprise and its applications to the network, as opposed to the
outdated model of bringing the network to the enterprise. This creates a flexible infrastructure
that allows placement of the right assets, at the right place, for the right reasons, in support of
business outcomes.
■ Pick partners based on their vision, capabilities and their partners. When considering
ecosystem partners, in particular colocation providers, it's critical that you understand their
long-term vision of the market, and how its evolution is changing their strategy. You'll find many
vendors' "vision" is to produce and provide more of the same — just in more places. However,
the important question is how they are preparing for the future of digital infrastructures, and how
that development will enable you (as a customer) to service your business more effectively.

Distributed Digital Infrastructure Management Emerges as the Key Enabler for I&O's
Transition to Digital Business
As enterprises move toward distributed digital infrastructures, one of the key pain points will be
operational process and tools (see Note 1). I&O has become great at managing silos, but staffs tend
to see the world from the construct of silos of servers, storage, networking, virtualization,
applications and so on. In distributed environments with a hybrid mix of sourcing and architectures,
the physical location of an asset (or process) will not be as clearly defined, and yet its attributes,
performance, KPIs and cost will have an increasingly important impact on how I&O delivers services
to end customers. Ultimately, I&O remains responsible for both the assets and the end-user
experience, and will need tools to actively monitor and manage any asset or process, anywhere, at
any time.

Digitalization's impact can best be observed in the emergence of newer technologies and products
providing an advanced analytical foundation (such as artificial intelligence for IT operations [AIOps])
and increasingly relevant monitoring technologies (digital experience monitoring, collective
intelligence benchmarking, unified communications monitoring and so on) that supports both

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 experience management and delivery automation functions. These are critical to enabling IT
operations management (ITOM) teams to manage a continuously growing and diverse set of
technologies, including those with disruptive impact (for example, IoT, wireless networking, cloud
and software-defined networking).

Recommendations:

■ Invest in the technologies needed to discover and manage a hybrid IT model so I&O can have
more proactive and business relevant insight — because over the long term, this is not about
transforming the infrastructure. It's about transforming how I&O is providing value in a digitally
distributed ecosystem.
■ Redefine supporting tools to better align with changing demands as the role and value
proposition of ITOM changes in support of digital infrastructures. These changes are typically
driven by functional groups that focus on managing customer experience quality, automating
the provisioning and configuration of resources, or analyzing the performance of technology
resources — wherever they are (see "IT Operations Management 2020: Shift to Succeed").

IT Talent Management and Retraining Existing Staff Are Critical Success Factors
I&O leaders are faced with a seemingly impossible challenge — to develop their staff skills to deliver
against the business demand, amid a new and unfamiliar level of infrastructure complexity. They
cannot afford to lose staff, yet have restrictions placed on new head count at a time when they feel
like 10 times as many resources are needed, especially those with institutional knowledge (see
"Talent Management: Dealing With Silos in a Hybrid Infrastructure World").

For most leaders, this represents a headache on top of every other headache, as they are faced
with the challenges of implementing, understanding and supporting new layers of integration,
orchestration, customization and configuration. In parallel, existing teams must deliver what they
have been doing to date, but also find ways to work harmoniously with others in a bimodal
environment that supports the aims of a digital business. So much more is demanded of individuals,
to the point where they are only able to focus on the immediate issue in front of them. Thus, they fall
into the siloed nature of thinking and behaving. All this is occurring at a time when the business
appetite for the pace of change and the complexity of infrastructures and technology solutions are
at an all-time high.

Recommendations:

■ Prioritize and develop staff versatility, complementing vertical expertise with the additional
capabilities needed. When the business view of a service relies on infrastructure provided by
multiple vendors, making the right decisions requires broad thinking, often beyond a single
technology silo. As IT moves toward the realm of an ecosystem of partners, connecting the
business to the right provider and adding value to this particular relationship require broad
understanding of both parties in the brokering relationship. Therefore, in distributed digital
infrastructures, the added skills required from a versatilist include two critical areas — business
knowledge and provider knowledge — and must also be underpinned by the ability to build
rapport.

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 With respect to business knowledge, versatility is needed to interpret business situations and
the resulting requirements correctly. This is clearly a critical skill in roles that involve solution
architecture. However, in a hybrid infrastructure, this becomes even more important for other
supporting staff who need to navigate multiple service delivery models and understand the
potential effects of their actions.
■ Actively develop individuals and teams, prioritizing collaborative skills and lateral thinking. Let's
begin to recognize what we really value in IT — not only depth in a single discipline (except in a
specific subset of people), but also breadth across multiple disciplines, coupled with depth in a
primary discipline. Real-world experience is more effective than just training to build the
necessary breadth and depth of knowledge needed for the emerging landscape of digital
infrastructure
■ The most effective IT people are always looking for new things to learn, and in many cases the
most interesting areas are the unknown areas. Enabling learning, even incentivizing it, is a
critical success factor as we move toward fully digital infrastructures. When employees realize
that their value is not only how much they know in a discipline, but how much they understand
the linkages between disciplines, and the impact on the business, IT as a whole will become a
much stronger organization, and more able to adapt to these changing environments.
Additionally, retention of high-quality talent is always an issue with IT organizations, but
employees that feel valued are often more motivated and less likely to change roles.

Gartner Recommended Reading

Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.

"Developing a Practical Hybrid Workload Placement Strategy"

"Extend the Reach of Enterprise IT With Global Infrastructure Delivery"

"Use Gartner's Connectivity Strategy to Optimize Cloud Performance and Cost"

"Talent Management: Dealing With Silos in a Hybrid Infrastructure World"

"Colocation-Based Interconnection Will Serve as the 'Glue' for Advanced Digital Business
Applications"

"IT Operations Management 2020: Shift to Succeed"

"Deliver Digital Business Results by Boosting Workforce Digital Dexterity"

Note 1 Distributed Digital Infrastructure Management

Distributed digital infrastructure management, or DDIM, involves the integration of tools designed to
monitor distributed environments and include devices, subnets, domains, data centers, edge
deployments and/or service providers. Its focus is on asset discovery, monitoring, KPI metrics,

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 optimization, dependency mapping and location of both physical and logical assets. While DCIM
providers will evolve toward DDIM, there will be both overlap and integration points with emerging
ITIM vendors.

More on This Topic

This is part of an in-depth collection of research. See the collection:

■ Research Roundup: Building and Marketing Cloud-Based Offerings — 2Q18

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