Speaking at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference in Sydney, Paul Delory, VP Analyst at Gartner said, “In the current economic climate, the biggest problem companies face in 2023 may not be IT infrastructure. I&O teams, however, will be impacted by economic and geopolitical forces and will have a vital role to play in ameliorating their effects.”

Delory continued, “This won’t be a year to realize grand ambitions, but it marks a moment to refocus, retool and rethink your infrastructure. In every crisis lies opportunity, and in this case, the chance to make positive changes that may be long overdue.”

According to the Stamford, Conn. research firm, the top four cloud, data center and edge infrastructure trends include the following:

Trend 1: Cloud Teams Will Optimize and Refactor Cloud Infrastructure

Public cloud usage is almost universal, but many deployments are ad hoc and poorly implemented, says Gartner. I&O teams have an opportunity this year to revisit hastily assembled or poorly architected cloud infrastructure to make it more efficient, resilient and cost-effective.

The focus of refactoring cloud infrastructure should be on optimizing costs by eliminating redundant, overbuilt or unused cloud infrastructure; building business resilience rather than service-level redundancy; using cloud infrastructure as a way to mitigate supply chain disruptions; and modernizing infrastructure. According to Gartner, 65% of application workloads will be optimal or ready for cloud delivery by 2027, up from 45% in 2022.

Trend 2: New Application Architectures Will Demand New Kinds of Infrastructure

I&O teams are continually challenged to meet new and growing demands with new types of infrastructure — including edge infrastructure for data-intensive use cases, non-x86 architectures for specialized workloads, serverless edge architectures and 5G mobile service. Gartner predicts 15% of on-premises production workloads will run in containers by 2026, up from less than 5% in 2022.

I&O professionals must evaluate alternative options with care, focusing on their ability to manage, integrate and transform in the face of constraints on time, talent and resources. “Don’t revert to traditional methods or solutions just because they’ve worked well in the past,” said Delory. “Challenging periods are times to innovate and find new solutions to meet business demands.”

Trend 3: Data Center Teams Will Adopt Cloud Principles On-Premises

Data centers are shrinking and migrating to platform-based colocation providers. Combined with new as-a-service models for physical infrastructure, this can bring cloud-like service-centricity and economic models to on-premises infrastructure.

According to Gartner, 35% of data center infrastructure will be managed from a cloud-based control plane by 2027, from less than 10% in 2022. I&O professionals should focus this year on building cloud-native infrastructure within the data center; migrating workloads from owned facilities to co-location facilities or the edge; or embracing as-a-service models for physical infrastructure.

Trend 4: Skills Growth: Top Priority for Successful Organizations

Lack of skills remains the biggest barrier to infrastructure modernization initiatives, with many organizations finding they cannot hire outside talent to fill these skills gaps. IT organizations will not succeed unless they prioritize organic skills growth.

I&O leaders must make operations skills growth their highest priority this year. Encourage I&O professionals to take on new roles as site reliability engineers or subject matter expert consultants for developer teams and business units. Gartner predicts 60% of data center infrastructure teams will have relevant automation and cloud skills by 2027, up from 30% in 2022.

The post These Four Trends Are Shaping the Future of IT Infrastructure appeared first on My TechDecisions.

A company that owns its own on-premises servers has more control over security, but are responsible for all of the upgrades, maintenance and other upkeep – not to mention the large up-front costs associated with the hardware.

In the cloud, most of that upgrading and maintenance is done by the provider, and organizations can pay for those services on a fixed, monthly basis.

Although on-premises systems have historically been viewed as more secure, recent attacks say otherwise, says Aviad Hasnis, CTO of autonomous breach protection company Cynet.

“It’s a trend that has really stressed out the fact that companies – especially in the mid market – that utilize these kinds of on-premises infrastructure don’t usually have the capabilities or the manpower to make sure they are all up to date in terms of security updates,” he said.

That’s why we’ve seen so many successful attacks against on-premises systems of late including the ProxyLogon and ProxyShell exploits of Microsoft Exchange Server vulnerabilities and the massive Kaseya ransomware attack, Hasnis says.

Why are there more attacks against on-prem?

One of the main reasons there are more attacks against on-premises systems is the fact that most cloud vulnerabilities aren’t assigned a CVE number, which makes it hard for hackers to discover the flaw and successful exploit it.

Case in point was the recently disclosed Azure Cosmos DB vulnerability. Microsoft mitigated the vulnerability shortly after it was discovered, and no customer data appears to be impacted.

Meanwhile, known vulnerabilities in on-premises systems are exploited until the IT department can patch their systems. For example, the ProxyLogon and ProxyShell vulnerabilities in Microsoft exchange were assigned a CVE and patched shortly after they were disclosed, but organizations that were slow to patch or implement workarounds remained vulnerable as attackers seized on the newly discovered flaws.

In the case of the Kaseya attack, the damage was limited to only on-premises customers of Kaseya using the VSA product, but once the breach was disclosed and the company had to manually reach out to customers and urge them to take their servers down.

Attacking Kaseya’s SaaS customers likely would have raised additional red flags that could have stopped the attack in its tracks, Hasnis says.

“There are many different defenses for detecting this kind of threat behavior,” Hasnis says.

Is the cloud safer?

In general, the cloud can be a much safer place to be if your organization practices SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM), which, according to Gartner, is the constant assessment of the security risk of your Saas applications, including reporting the configuration of native SaaS security settings and tweaking that configuration to reduce risk.

For example, someone using Microsoft 365 without two-factor authentication should trigger a warning, Hasnis says.

“The fact that someone uses cloud or SaaS infrastructure doesn’t necessarily mean it’s safe, but they have to make sure their organization aligns with the best security protocols,” Hasnis says.

Especially for smaller organizations that don’t have the in-house staff and expertise to update and patch on-premises systems after an attack, migrating to the cloud can help cut down on that response time and keep the company safe by enlisting the help of the provider and other internal IT experts.

“If your organization is spread around the globe in more than one location and you’re working on-prem, you don’t necessarily have access to all of the different infrastructure within the environment,” Hasnis says.

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