Future of Digital Infrastructure
Ensure faster delivery of reliable digital services and experiences
The Future of Digital Infrastructure
Making the right decisions about where to invest in digital infrastructure modernization and integration fundamentally impacts an organization's ability to execute its digital-first business agenda. Enterprise agility and operational effectiveness are largely dependent on the responsiveness, scalability, and resiliency of the digital infrastructure used to enable mission critical applications, data operations, and connectivity demanded by customers, partners, and employees.
The Future of Digital Infrastructure: Distributed By Design
Enterprises require more robustly interconnected, agile, and well-integrated infrastructure environments. A "distributed by design" approach facilitates greater business flexibility and agility than siloed hybrid or multi-cloud strategies.
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Inside the Future of Digital Infrastructure graphic description
The text, "Data Center - Public Cloud - Edge." Above this text are three ribbon shaped elements with the following text -- "Optimization," "Innovation," and "Resiliency." Above the ribbon-shaped elements is a large circle with the text, "Cloud Technologies" surrounded by two smaller circles with text -- "Ubiquitous Consumption" and "Autonomous Operations."
IDC’s Future of Digital Infrastructure framework provides a model for understanding how a successful digital-first strategy is built on critical digital infrastructure investments deployed across dedicated on-premises datacenters, edge locations, and public cloud resources.
Cloud Technologies
Serve as the foundation for platforms and systems used to build and deliver cloud services and enable delivery using a variety of shared public cloud service, managed service, dedicated infrastructure, and software-as-a-service models.
Cloud technologies include modern computing, storage, and networking, as well as software for infrastructure automation and observability; data management and mobility; and security and are built for on-demand scalability, software-defined control, API enabled integration, and usage or consumption-based metering.
Autonomous Operations
Emphasizes the value of software-defined automation based on an infrastructure control plane design and informed by AI/ML-powered analytics and policy-based governance. Autonomous operations enable self-healing, self-driving and self-service infrastructure access, configuration, deployment, and Day 2 operations, along with on-demand workload scaling and end-to-end infrastructure resiliency.
Ubiquitous consumption
Empowers digitally driven businesses to take a holistic approach to assessing and leveraging all available deployment options across digital infrastructure ecosystems. Ubiquitous consumption provides seamless experiences to end users and business units and provides an opportunity for IT to adopt as-a-service consumption and support models as a part of digital infrastructure IT strategy that aligns spending with business outcomes and shifts routine activities such as capacity planning, lifecycle support, infrastructure monitoring, and cost optimization to equipment and software vendors.
IDC’s analysis shows that the average U.S. enterprise has significant opportunities to improve digital business outcomes by:
- Accelerating cloud native infrastructure adoption
- Implementing consistent digital infrastructure operating models across on-premises, edge, and public cloud infrastructure
- Increasing infrastructure automation powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) analytics
Digital infrastructure resiliency – the ability to seamlessly adapt and insulate infrastructure and the supported business services from disruptions – is critical to overall digital business agility and success. Digital infrastructure resiliency leaders demonstrate significantly higher levels of year-over-year improvement in revenue growth, time to market, and operational efficiency compared to digital infrastructure resiliency latecomers.
IDC’s Digital Infrastructure Resiliency Index is a framework that enterprises can use to assess their own Digital Infrastructure Resiliency Quotient (DRIQ) using a 100-point scale to pinpoint top digital infrastructure investment priorities proven to significantly improve digital business outcomes.
Business leaders must frame their business cases for creating and enabling these digital infrastructure platforms in terms that extend beyond traditional datacenter and cloud budget calculations. And, they must work across the organization to transform operational environments, sourcing, and financial models to align with top business priorities, including:
- Customer experience and digital engagement
- Digital business agility and innovation
- Employee productivity and retention
- Data-driven business and decision making
- Business risk reduction and compliance improvement
- Total cost of operations (TCO) optimization
- Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and sustainability initiatives
2021 Digital Infrastructure Awards Videos
Mary Johnston Turner – Research Vice President, Future of Digital Infrastructure, IDC
Ashish Parmar – Chief Information Officer, Tapestry
Rick Villars – Group Vice President, Worldwide Research, IDC
Steven Samarge – Chief Technology Officer, Toyota Financial Service
Bob Bender – Chief Technology Officer, Founders Federal Credit Union