6 Challenges to the Future of IT Infrastructure

Introduction

To stay relevant to the highly competitive and technology-driven business environment, organizations need a robust and flexible IT infrastructure that can predict and quickly respond to the emerging requirements.

Information technology (IT) infrastructure is a strategic combination of hardware, software and other resources and services needed to host IT workloads for the efficient deployment, operation and management of IT environment in an organization. Management of such a strategic framework is quite challenging and defines the organization’s success path.

The Outlook

The uniqueness lies in its capability to facilitate life support network for technological applications that an organization deploys to ensure smooth functioning of its operations. An efficient framework should additionally support the transition to next-gen technologies such as the cloud.

As we move towards a more digitalized world, sophisticated technologies such as AI, network communications and robotics continue to redefine the way businesses interact with one another and with computers. It plays a significant role in enabling enterprises to take full advantage of the opportunities enabled by next-gen technologies.

Challenges

As information technology continues to gain more prominence, new business processes and models are being developed around new, emerging technologies. The fast-changing environment opens up a plethora of opportunities for businesses. To leverage such vast potential, organizations need to ensure that their IT infrastructure is well-equipped to identify and address the upcoming challenges in the fast-changing environment.

Security

As data continues to become easily accessible, it gets more vulnerable to exploitation by cyber-criminals and intruders. Security becomes a major concern within it as organizations continue to increase operations around latest technologies such as cloud computing. A proactive setup would involve backup and recovery solutions as part of an overall security protocol.

Data Acquisition

Enterprises today rely on high-performance resources with greater data sets. Data speeds get slowed down by certain applications and defensive mechanisms. Advanced computing frameworks need flexible and sophisticated data acquisition methodology with high server speeds. The IT infrastructure should be capable of storing data through high-speed networks with computing capability to tap idle cycles. A cost-effective, simplified infrastructure with efficient software and exceptional commodity processors would redefine the data acquisition approaches.

They are expected to be more flexible and scalable to accommodate a range of applications and storage solutions.

Virtualization

Going further, modern infrastructure would comprise the cutting-edge software-defined networking (SDN), which aims to make the network as flexible as virtual servers. Adoption of compelling technologies, such as virtualization would require more emphasis on security.

Unlike, physical servers, virtual servers can be easily accessed and exploited from the virtualization host. Securing a virtualization environment poses a major challenge to organizations, especially in terms of identity management, information control and application access and security.

Data Analytics

The growing volumes of data demand new approaches to data processing and integration tasks. Inadequate infrastructure poses a serious setback for organizations that continue to invest heavily in Big Data to make real-time analytics and gain significant insights.

The existing IT infrastructure in organizations should be evaluated to comprehend data extraction and data storage techniques as well as approaches to analyze both structured and unstructured data. Organizations require sophisticated infrastructures to support high computing and data analysis in a cost-efficient and competitive style.

Cloud Computing

As organizations increasingly shift to cloud computing platforms to address their storage and computing tasks, they face a unique set of challenges. Integration of cloud infrastructure with existing IT infrastructure requires considerable software and hardware expertise. Customization, performance, and security are other key concerns.

Also, despite successful integration, cloud infrastructures do not ensure optimal performance for storage, servers, software and network. The infrastructure needs to be constantly monitored for likely errors in hardware performance.

Mobile Devices

The proliferation and extensive use of mobile devices pose a major challenge to an enterprise’s IT infrastructure. Concepts such as BYOD (bring your own device) to empower workforce and increase productivity would pose an additional burden on the infrastructure.

The upcoming concepts would demand solutions to deal with the multiplicity of ways that employees access company data. The infrastructure must adapt to new challenges such as accommodating more clients demanding access, a huge volume of data, high network capacities and computing speeds.

Organizations should upgrade their setup through significant investments, especially for improved security and technical concerns to deal with a vast variety of Android devices. The infrastructure should primarily be capable of managing devices, both company-owned and employee-owned involving encrypting sensitive data and tracking data storage.

Conclusion

The emerging challenges require a new level of expertise both software and hardware. New generations of professionals with adequate expertise and training would find huge job potential to explore within this domain. Opportunities and challenges co-exist and anyone who expects to explore new opportunities should be well-equipped to handle unexpected challenges.

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