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Gartner: Infrastructure & Operations Must Shift Focus from Efficiency to Adaptive Resilience

In a world where constant change is becoming routine, Gartner said that infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders must shift their traditional focus from efficiency to one of adaptive resilience.

"I&O leaders must re-imagine how they manage their talent, their platforms and operations, if they want to dynamically and quickly exploit new opportunities," said Dennis Smith, Research VP at Gartner.

I&O Leaders Must Retain, Attract and Evolve Talent

In a world where being adaptable is paramount, talent management plays a more critical role than ever for I&O organizations. A Gartner survey showed that talent availability is the most significant adoption barrier to 64% of emerging technologies. This dynamic — combined with a fiercely competitive labor market — are putting more pressure than ever on I&O leaders.

I&O leaders must learn how to retain the talent they have, attract new talent, and evolve everyone's skills along the way. By embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion's best practices, organizations can build the right resources over time and use agile learning methods to adapt and evolve skillsets as needed.

Gartner analysts predict that by 2026, 50% of large organizations will use agile learning as the upskilling/reskilling method.

I&O Leaders Must Build Adaptive Platforms

"With over 40% of organizations' staff now acting as business technologists, we have a wider variety of users depending on IT departments today than ever before," said Douglas Toombs, Research VP at Gartner. "The rapid growth of "citizen IT" business technologists, paired with the vast array of public and private infrastructure choices available in the market, has placed more pressure on I&O to perform than ever before."

By building adaptive platforms that are loosely coupled, but tightly integrated, I&O can empower creators of all types of systems throughout the organization.

"As hyperautomation is a critical path to achieve growth and operational excellence, I&O leaders must make automation a first-class discipline in everything they do," said Toombs.

By embracing hyperautomation strategies, I&O can pave the way for intelligence systems, such as AIOps and incident response automation, that play a key role in the day-to-day operations of IT.

Gartner estimates that by 2025, 60% of I&O teams will use AI-augmented automation across their organizations, up from 1% in 2020.

I&O Leaders Must Co-Create with the Business

"No matter how good your technologies or solutions are, no matter how talented your staff is, I&O leaders must align I&O with the way the business works to continuously adapt in a world of constant change," said Julia Palmer, Research VP at Gartner. "I&O leaders will have to learn to work towards adaptive operations to focus on multiple business models, and rethink how I&O engages and partners with the business."

I&O leaders must help their organization grow adaptively by sensing and responding to business changes. Embedding I&O closer to the business with the use of fusion teaming will enable leaders to quickly adjust plans, forecasts, budgets, and resources as business environments change.

"This is not about growing I&O. It is about I&O enabling the growth of the business," Palmer concluded.

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Gartner: Infrastructure & Operations Must Shift Focus from Efficiency to Adaptive Resilience

In a world where constant change is becoming routine, Gartner said that infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders must shift their traditional focus from efficiency to one of adaptive resilience.

"I&O leaders must re-imagine how they manage their talent, their platforms and operations, if they want to dynamically and quickly exploit new opportunities," said Dennis Smith, Research VP at Gartner.

I&O Leaders Must Retain, Attract and Evolve Talent

In a world where being adaptable is paramount, talent management plays a more critical role than ever for I&O organizations. A Gartner survey showed that talent availability is the most significant adoption barrier to 64% of emerging technologies. This dynamic — combined with a fiercely competitive labor market — are putting more pressure than ever on I&O leaders.

I&O leaders must learn how to retain the talent they have, attract new talent, and evolve everyone's skills along the way. By embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion's best practices, organizations can build the right resources over time and use agile learning methods to adapt and evolve skillsets as needed.

Gartner analysts predict that by 2026, 50% of large organizations will use agile learning as the upskilling/reskilling method.

I&O Leaders Must Build Adaptive Platforms

"With over 40% of organizations' staff now acting as business technologists, we have a wider variety of users depending on IT departments today than ever before," said Douglas Toombs, Research VP at Gartner. "The rapid growth of "citizen IT" business technologists, paired with the vast array of public and private infrastructure choices available in the market, has placed more pressure on I&O to perform than ever before."

By building adaptive platforms that are loosely coupled, but tightly integrated, I&O can empower creators of all types of systems throughout the organization.

"As hyperautomation is a critical path to achieve growth and operational excellence, I&O leaders must make automation a first-class discipline in everything they do," said Toombs.

By embracing hyperautomation strategies, I&O can pave the way for intelligence systems, such as AIOps and incident response automation, that play a key role in the day-to-day operations of IT.

Gartner estimates that by 2025, 60% of I&O teams will use AI-augmented automation across their organizations, up from 1% in 2020.

I&O Leaders Must Co-Create with the Business

"No matter how good your technologies or solutions are, no matter how talented your staff is, I&O leaders must align I&O with the way the business works to continuously adapt in a world of constant change," said Julia Palmer, Research VP at Gartner. "I&O leaders will have to learn to work towards adaptive operations to focus on multiple business models, and rethink how I&O engages and partners with the business."

I&O leaders must help their organization grow adaptively by sensing and responding to business changes. Embedding I&O closer to the business with the use of fusion teaming will enable leaders to quickly adjust plans, forecasts, budgets, and resources as business environments change.

"This is not about growing I&O. It is about I&O enabling the growth of the business," Palmer concluded.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...