This week’s five is a weekly column on five recent reads from all over the web. This week, we’ll talk about the future of IT management.
How fast does technology develop? We don’t have to explain Moore’s law to answer that—it’s pretty obvious. Just over a hundred years ago, humans flew for the first time. Now, we have the Voyager-I wandering beyond our solar system’s boundaries. Amazing, isn’t it? And how fast is digital technology growing? Well, it’s definitely faster than flight technology. I’d say now is a good time to prepare for your IT’s future, because it may come faster than you expect.
Take hybrid clouds, for example. A hybrid cloud is an integrated cloud computing platform that utilizes both public and private cloud functions. According to a study by Hybrid Hive, 79 percent of IT executives believe hybrid environments are inevitably the future. At the same time, though, 62 percent said they need to learn more about hybrid IT and 37 percent said they don’t even know what a hybrid IT model looks like. That’s what happens when the future approaches faster than expected. And that’s why we all need to prepare.
[To learn more about hybrid IT, click here.]
But how do we start? It’s simple: Study the evolution of IT tools and solutions and figure out what change factors cause transformation. One of the most important change factors is the cloud. In fact, Gartner has predicted that by 2020, a “no cloud” policy will be as rare as a “no internet” policy is today. Solutions, whether they’re service management, network management, or device management, have also started to shift to the cloud.
[To learn about network management’s shift to the cloud, click here.]
Other change factors to notice are shadow IT and IoT. And they both involve connected devices and may lead to network vulnerabilities. With personal phones, tablets, and laptops coming into the picture, shadow IT has become even more prominent. And as far as IoT is concerned, Gartner has already predicted that by 2020, it will lead to approximately 21 billion connected devices and more than 25 percent of identified attacks. Better buckle up. Start with an integrated client management tool that can support multiple operating systems on different devices and comes with additional features such as patch management, remote control, asset management, and mobile application management.
[To learn how shadow IT makes networks vulnerable, click here.]
[To learn what to look for in client management tools, click here.]
Once all these change factors are identified, it’s time to embrace them. Whether big or small, with a technological change comes an organizational change. It can be a top down culture change, a departmental change, or a “testing the water” project. According to a new MIT Sloan Management review, nearly 90 percent of digitally maturing organizations have merged their digital strategy with their overall business strategy. The survey also indicates some more prominent trends including the cultivation of dynamic culture, change agent hiring, and investment in innovations.
[To learn more about different approaches to digital transformation, click here.]
Last generation’s future is already here, and now it’s our job to prepare for the innovations to come. With the right solutions in place, we can welcome the future, fully prepared.
Check out last week’s five here.
