Those inevitable evolutions in technology that your business must embrace to stay competitive tend to involve integrations of old and new systems, software, functions, and processes.
These integrations often turn out to be arcane and complex, which means you require long-term as well as short-term technical expertise that your staff can access anytime — technical expertise from people familiar with your IT setup and who are, essentially, on call.
Here’s a shortlist of what your IT infrastructure soon will be adapting to — if it isn’t already — and where those tech on-call pressure points will be emerging next:
Virtualization
While virtual machines enable server infrastructures to be scaled up without additional hardware, there’s often a ripple effect: other systems and networks must be adapted to the newly virtualized environment — something that requires the right technical expertise during both deployment and afterward.
Cloud adoption
Not only is everybody in “the cloud,” everybody is in lots of clouds that need coordination, integration, and, given how many of these clouds are public, security. Private clouds, meanwhile, require plenty of expertise in virtualization, automation, monitoring, and more.
Security
One of the best ways to keep your IT environment secure is to make sure it’s well-managed. And that’s not an easy task at a time when cloud, mobile, and social capabilities’ demands for information access are transforming how business is conducted — and how IT infrastructures must be protected.
Big data and (AI) analytics
AI-based analytics can help you automate operations and gain insights from the ever-increasing volumes of data you’re collecting. But today’s large and varied data volumes often trip up traditional processing and storage approaches. You’ll likely need to adapt your infrastructure (compute power, network bandwidth, endpoints, etc.) as well as how you integrate and manage it. This, in turn, requires ongoing technical expertise.
IoT
Large-scale, IoT-based machine-to-machine interaction is closer than you may think. Companies like Amazon Web Services, Bosch, Cisco, Dell, GE, and Hitachi Data Systems are committing to IoT, and as this technology spreads, you’ll need the technical expertise to exploit it.
Blockchain
The distributed and unalterable digital ledger capabilities that constitute blockchains are already beginning to help businesses improve data security and automate key operations.
To stay competitive, your business needs the appropriate technical expertise to support and maintain its implementations of these important value-generating technologies. In my next post, I’ll tell you how your business can access technical experts who are certified, vetted, familiar with your IT infrastructure and its foibles — and available on-call 24 x 7 x 365.
