Getting the Best Value From the Cloud

Over the past two years, in response to the pandemic, organizations have accelerated widespread adoption of remote work while recognizing the need for deeper online customer engagement. At the same time, organizations have had to deal with a rising number of cyberthreats and challenges related to recruiting and retaining employees. In this environment, the most effective digital infrastructure leaders are able to disrupt traditional approaches to IT planning and budgeting and align infrastructure architecture, modernization, operations, and funding models with their organization's most important digital business goals. IDC's Future of Digital Infrastructure framework provides a model for understanding how the success of digital business is built on critical infrastructure investments deployed across dedicated on-premises datacenters, edge locations, and public cloud resources.

Autonomous operations for digital infrastructure leverage robust observability and automation technologies – combined with outcomes-driven governance – to enable intelligent self-driving infrastructure operations, compliance, and performance. Enterprises can reduce operational friction and implement full-stack, applicationaware automation across complex on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure operations to deliver consistent application performance, security, and service management across all workloads and resources. While the potential rewards are great, enterprises face challenges when implementing solutions for autonomous operations. IDC has identified the major challenges and documented five best practices for optimizing autonomous operations and enabling enterprises to streamline and standardize infrastructure operations, improve operational efficiency, and prioritize investments to support the long-term evolution of digital business capabilities.

IDC has identified four practices for maximizing the business value of consumption-as-a-service models for digital infrastructure. These practices enable enterprises to partner more deeply with application and business owners, better align infrastructure spending with business needs, and free up internal staff to focus on critical business priorities.