

PanelCast 2019 Predictions: Accelerating Pace of Change in IT
The speed at which innovation is expected is driving the need for containers, serverless, etc. What does this mean for how organizations view the role of IT?
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The pace of change is steadily increasing, and it’s not going to slow down in the foreseeable future. As technology continues to evolve, it’s become increasingly clear that the de facto architecture will be a hybrid cloud model. We also expect to see greater adoption of edge computing. Security and data protection are increasingly becoming boardroom issues. We’ll see more widespread adoption of containers. And, perhaps most importantly for many people, we expect a continued shift for IT professionals into more of a hybrid role of tech/business.
Raghuram acknowledges that many new applications are going to be designed with the intent to leverage containers and cloud technologies, or serverless. The trick is supporting these new technologies without leaving the old ones behind. “These platforms need to be supported in a hybrid context,” says Raghuram. Ultimately, the responsibility for effectively managing these platforms in a consistent manner lies with IT, and how well this is done will be a key measure of success in 2019 and going forward.
“What’s interesting,” says Wronski, pointing out the technology-first backgrounds of most IT professionals, “is we sometimes forget the business process side of this, and there is a lot of adaption a business has to go through to even allow IT to help manage these two distinct groups.”
Miller acknowledges that it’s not an easy thing. “IT is leaner and becoming more generalist, yet there’s still these specialized areas that people need to support, so it’s going to be tricky.” Communication is the key here, and figuring out how IT can integrate with the business.
Ultimately, it comes down to what the organizations will expect, and according to Ready, this will be flexibility. “If there’s one thing I’m hearing out there, it’s that IT needs to be much more flexible.”