Gartner Conference on IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies: Day 1 Highlights | MarketScreener

We bring you news and highlights from the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies conference, happening this week in Las Vegas, Nevada. Below is a collection of key announcements and insights from the conference.

On day one of the conference, we highlight Gartner’s keynote, the role of virtual machines, containers, and serverless in the cloud, and insights into edge computing. Be sure to check this page throughout the day for updates.

Presented by Roger Williams, VP Analyst; Thomas Bittman, Distinguished VP Analyst and Dennis Smith, VP Analyst at Gartner

Dramatic global changes and talent shortages are intensifying the ever-present need to accelerate innovation, forcing infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders to rewrite their future and look to a new horizon. In this session, Gartner analysts Roger Williams, Thomas Bittman, and Dennis Smith explored how I&O leaders need to drive I&O forward to continuously match their organization’s digital ambitions and capabilities.

Key points to remember

• Immerse yourself in the organization

  • “Our data shows that at least 84% of enterprises and 59% of government entities have established ‘fusion teams’ – and 43% are already reporting outside of IT to get closer to the point of value delivery .”

  • “Organizations operating with a distributed, concurrent approach are 2.5 times faster than organizations running initiatives in a centrally managed IT team.”

• Accelerate adoption of automation and platform engineering

  • “Adopting a platform engineering approach is vital. I&O leaders use platform engineering to deliver shared infrastructure platforms”

  • While Gartner predicts that by 2025, 70% of new applications will be developed with low-code/no-code approaches, Platform Engineering helps I&O managers use this trend to their advantage.

• Retool your I&O workforce

  • “Build the right skills in your workforce, empower them, and put them in the right places at the right time.”

• Building an innovative engine

  • “Think of an innovation lab as your engine of innovation that attracts new technologies, tests and evaluates them. Then generate the best of the best candidates for further development and implementation.”

  • “Design is important. Build your innovation engine right and it will take you I&O forward.”

Presented by Tony Iams, VP Analyst, Gartner

As cloud computing continues to increase, infrastructure is becoming serverless. While organizations may think that containers are now replacing virtual machines, these new forms of virtualization complement each other. In this session, Tony Iams, VP Analyst at Gartner, reviewed the factors organizations should consider when choosing the right approach to virtualization with a given application.

Key points to remember

• Virtual machines virtualize an entire computer and manage capacity by creating and moving virtual machines.

• Containers: This method virtualizes an operating system (OS) user space, allowing multiple instances of user space to share a single operating system kernel.

• Serverless: This method virtualizes the application so that individual functions of the application are tied to resources as needed.

• Follow three steps to select the appropriate virtualization method for deploying applications in the cloud:

  • Start with a broad classification of the application that will be deployed.

  • Identify strategic considerations for hosting the application.

  • Refine choices based on tactical considerations.

• “With new apps, leverage cloud-native architecture attributes where possible:

  • Modularity, programmability, elasticity and resilience.”

Presented by Thomas Bittman, VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner

Digital transformation requires extending computing to the edge, but the requirements, use cases, and technology choices for edge computing are wide ranging. In this session, Thomas Bittman, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, discussed how companies can build a cutting-edge strategy that accelerates and fuels successful deployments and future scalability through discovery, consistent tools and processes, and to the evolution of best practices.

Key points to remember

• “The edge is the physical place where things and people connect to the networked digital world. Edge computing is part of a distributed computing topology where information processing is located close to the edge. ”

• “By 2025, 50% of edge computing solutions deployed without an enterprise edge computing strategy in place will fail to meet deployment time, functionality, and/or cost goals. ”

• “There are five elements to an effective edge computing strategic plan: establishing the vision, determining the use cases, identifying and managing risks, creating and maintaining standards, and managing execution.”

• “For the foundation of an edge computing strategy, understand the business strategies that will require edge computing to succeed and ensure the strategies are linked.”

• “There are four imperatives that push computing to the edge: latency, data gravity, semi-autonomy, privacy, and security.”

• “Identify the relationship between the drivers of edge computing and your industry and business – for example, healthcare is very privacy/security focused while defense is semi-autonomy focused.”

• “Proofs of concept (POC) are important, especially with the large number of first-of-its-kind deployments or highly competitive solutions. Edge computing strategy must include how best to test the limits of a POC.”

Check back tomorrow for more conference highlights.