Gartner: Top Trends Impacting Infrastructure and Operations for 2022

Gartner highlighted 6 trends that infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders must start preparing for in the next 12-18 months.

"I&O leaders need to drive change, not simply absorb it," said Jeffrey Hewitt, Research VP at Gartner. "They are expected to deliver more adaptable and resilient service from anywhere — and for an increasingly distributed workforce. This is pressuring I&O to take actions that will tie their decisions more closely to business requirements, a theme that runs through this year's trends."

Here are the top trends impacting I&O in 2022:

Trend 1: Just-In-Time Infrastructure

The speed at which infrastructure can be deployed is becoming just as important as putting the right infrastructure in the right place — colocation, data center, at the edge and more. This is the idea behind just-in-time infrastructure.

Borrowed from the term "just-in-time manufacturing," this trend aims to reduce infrastructure deployment times as well as fuel enterprise responsiveness to business needs and anywhere operations. Gartner expects it to be a differentiating factor when enterprises compare and negotiate with service providers moving forward.

Trend 2: Digital Natives

Digital-native companies are those that made public cloud and other digital capabilities part of their business model from the start, such as ride sharing applications or digital food delivery services. They combine different revenue approaches to monetize digital assets to gain new customers and boost market share and have only become more commonplace since the onset of the pandemic.

"There is an opportunity for traditional I&O organizations to leverage their digital-native counterparts that thrived during the pandemic to also produce highly agile, innovative and competitive offerings themselves, or join those that can," said Hewitt. "I&O leaders are faced with a "join or compete" dilemma."

By 2025, 70% of I&O leaders who ignore innovation will be marginalized to legacy system support only.

Trend 3: Management Confluence

This trend reflects the need for the growing number of management and monitoring tools — from IT service management (ITSM) to artificial intelligence operations (AIOps) and more — to be brought together in a single, comprehensive tool. Such integration is indispensable in the adoption of composable technologies, one of the three domains of business composability, which allows components of systems and data to combine more quickly and easily.

According to the 2022 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey, 58% of high-composability enterprises build out integration capabilities for data, analytics and applications. These organizations reported better business performance compared with peers or competitors in the past year.

"I&O leaders can extend composability throughout the entire technology stack by inventorying their current management tool usage and identifying those that can be combined to form a more valuable, all-inclusive portfolio that improves I&O agility and drives optimal business results," said Hewitt.

Trend 4: Data Proliferation

Data will continue to multiply in variety, velocity and volume. As businesses continue to expand their data collection and holding efforts, I&O will be instrumental in guiding the policies surrounding processing, retention and legal requirements of the enterprise's data.

"I&O workforces need to work closely with their chief data officer to expand data literacy and effectively support data management across the enterprise," said Hewitt.

Trend 5: Business Acumen

I&O leaders are guiding their functions through a rapidly changing and distributed technology environment, which is threatened by the IT talent gap and requires new skills. According to a recent Gartner survey, 64% of I&O leaders point to insufficient skills and resources as one of their greatest challenges this past year.

"Technical skills' shelf life is shortening," said Hewitt. "As the I&O function is asked to provide more business justification for what they do, organizations are looking for I&O new hires to have business backgrounds rather than strictly technical degrees."

Gartner expects that by 2025, CIOs will fill 65% of open I&O leader positions with people that have no I&O experience.

Trend 6: Career Ladders to Career Lattices

Similar to the business acumen trend, I&O is moving away from single domain career paths driven by workloads and legacy technical skills. In fact, 29% of the skills in an average I&O job posting in 2018 will not be needed by 2022, according to Gartner Talent Neuron data.

Instead, I&O teams are moving laterally across a competency-based lattice that takes into account softer skills and emphasizes both learning agility and cross-domain expertise.

"While this certainly requires a mindset adjustment for some of the more tenured I&O workers, there will be much more opportunity within I&O teams as they move away from territorial thinking and toward fostering a collaborative environment," said Hewitt.

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Gartner: Top Trends Impacting Infrastructure and Operations for 2022

Gartner highlighted 6 trends that infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders must start preparing for in the next 12-18 months.

"I&O leaders need to drive change, not simply absorb it," said Jeffrey Hewitt, Research VP at Gartner. "They are expected to deliver more adaptable and resilient service from anywhere — and for an increasingly distributed workforce. This is pressuring I&O to take actions that will tie their decisions more closely to business requirements, a theme that runs through this year's trends."

Here are the top trends impacting I&O in 2022:

Trend 1: Just-In-Time Infrastructure

The speed at which infrastructure can be deployed is becoming just as important as putting the right infrastructure in the right place — colocation, data center, at the edge and more. This is the idea behind just-in-time infrastructure.

Borrowed from the term "just-in-time manufacturing," this trend aims to reduce infrastructure deployment times as well as fuel enterprise responsiveness to business needs and anywhere operations. Gartner expects it to be a differentiating factor when enterprises compare and negotiate with service providers moving forward.

Trend 2: Digital Natives

Digital-native companies are those that made public cloud and other digital capabilities part of their business model from the start, such as ride sharing applications or digital food delivery services. They combine different revenue approaches to monetize digital assets to gain new customers and boost market share and have only become more commonplace since the onset of the pandemic.

"There is an opportunity for traditional I&O organizations to leverage their digital-native counterparts that thrived during the pandemic to also produce highly agile, innovative and competitive offerings themselves, or join those that can," said Hewitt. "I&O leaders are faced with a "join or compete" dilemma."

By 2025, 70% of I&O leaders who ignore innovation will be marginalized to legacy system support only.

Trend 3: Management Confluence

This trend reflects the need for the growing number of management and monitoring tools — from IT service management (ITSM) to artificial intelligence operations (AIOps) and more — to be brought together in a single, comprehensive tool. Such integration is indispensable in the adoption of composable technologies, one of the three domains of business composability, which allows components of systems and data to combine more quickly and easily.

According to the 2022 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey, 58% of high-composability enterprises build out integration capabilities for data, analytics and applications. These organizations reported better business performance compared with peers or competitors in the past year.

"I&O leaders can extend composability throughout the entire technology stack by inventorying their current management tool usage and identifying those that can be combined to form a more valuable, all-inclusive portfolio that improves I&O agility and drives optimal business results," said Hewitt.

Trend 4: Data Proliferation

Data will continue to multiply in variety, velocity and volume. As businesses continue to expand their data collection and holding efforts, I&O will be instrumental in guiding the policies surrounding processing, retention and legal requirements of the enterprise's data.

"I&O workforces need to work closely with their chief data officer to expand data literacy and effectively support data management across the enterprise," said Hewitt.

Trend 5: Business Acumen

I&O leaders are guiding their functions through a rapidly changing and distributed technology environment, which is threatened by the IT talent gap and requires new skills. According to a recent Gartner survey, 64% of I&O leaders point to insufficient skills and resources as one of their greatest challenges this past year.

"Technical skills' shelf life is shortening," said Hewitt. "As the I&O function is asked to provide more business justification for what they do, organizations are looking for I&O new hires to have business backgrounds rather than strictly technical degrees."

Gartner expects that by 2025, CIOs will fill 65% of open I&O leader positions with people that have no I&O experience.

Trend 6: Career Ladders to Career Lattices

Similar to the business acumen trend, I&O is moving away from single domain career paths driven by workloads and legacy technical skills. In fact, 29% of the skills in an average I&O job posting in 2018 will not be needed by 2022, according to Gartner Talent Neuron data.

Instead, I&O teams are moving laterally across a competency-based lattice that takes into account softer skills and emphasizes both learning agility and cross-domain expertise.

"While this certainly requires a mindset adjustment for some of the more tenured I&O workers, there will be much more opportunity within I&O teams as they move away from territorial thinking and toward fostering a collaborative environment," said Hewitt.

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If AI is the engine of a modern organization, then data engineering is the road system beneath it. You can build the most powerful engine in the world, but without paved roads, traffic signals, and bridges that can support its weight, it will stall. In many enterprises, the engine is ready. The roads are not ...

Why AI Is the Differentiator for Operationally Resilient Organizations

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

Escaping Pilot Purgatory: How AI Becomes an Operational Advantage

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Closing the Gap in Modern Tech and the Tools Meant to Monitor Them

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

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Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

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Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

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The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...