Gartner predicts major infrastructure trends

Four major industry trends are expected to shape the future of cloud, data centre and edge infrastructure, according to analysts from Gartner.

The research firm predicted at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies Conference in Sydney that the weak economic climate will push infrastructure and operations teams to pivot to support new technologies and new ways of working.

The first major cloud, data centre and edge infrastructure trend involves cloud teams optimising and refactoring cloud infrastructure to reduce costs by eliminating redundant, overbuilt or unused cloud infrastructure while mitigating supply chain disruptions.

According to Gartner, 65% of application workloads will be optimal or ready for cloud delivery by 2027, up from 45% in 2022.

Second, Gartner expects infrastructure and operations teams to embrace new kinds of infrastructure, including dedicated edge infrastructure for data-intensive use cases, to help support emerging new application architectures.

Third, Gartner is predicting that data centre teams will adopt cloud principles for on-premise data centres to support cloud-like service-centricity and economic models. The company expects 35% of data centre infrastructure to be managed from a cloud-based control plane by 2027, up from less than 10% in 2022.

Finally, Gartner expects a growing number of organisations to make skills growth a top priority to address barriers to infrastructure modernisation initiatives. By 2027, the firm believes that 60% of data centre infrastructure teams will be supported by automation and cloud skills.

Gartner VP Analyst Paul Delory said these major trends are expected to have major impacts. “In the current economic climate, the biggest problem companies face in 2023 may not be IT infrastructure. Infrastructure and operations teams, however, will be impacted by economic and geopolitical forces and will have a vital role to play in ameliorating their effects,” he said.

“This won’t be a year to realise 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.”

Image credit: iStock.com/Vladimir_Timofeev