
Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018. Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Rick Fitz, SVP and GM IT Markets, Splunk
AI, DevSecOps usher in new era of IT in 2018
A recent global survey by analyst firm Quocirca
revealed that the average organization suffers five critical IT incidents a
month, with each one costing the IT department an average of $36,326, and a
further $105,302 to the business as a whole. In addition, the survey found that
the average organization logs about 1,200 IT incidents per month, of which five
will be critical, and 80 percent of organizations report having operational
blind spots-particularly across next-generation technology stacks, hindering
their ability to respond to IT incidents quickly.
Moreover, there are 111 billion lines of new software code being produced each year - and each one can introduce a new
vulnerability to an organization.
Sobering statistics like these underscore the
reality for IT: IT departments are forced to take resources away from the
development of new services to maintain existing infrastructure, even as
customer demand, business objectives and market forces mandate rapid IT
innovation.
IT environments are more complex than ever,
spanning data centers, cloud services and on-the-edge devices such as mobile
and IoT. Because systems are often siloed, IT can struggle to collect and
correlate information. This makes it difficult to monitor infrastructure and
rapidly troubleshoot problems, which that could translate into valuable time
dedicated to important IT priorities. Organizations are confronted with a new
era of IT in which they must gain real-time, end-to-end visibility across the
entire IT environment to control their infrastructure while improving
opportunities to add value.
Looking ahead to 2018, here are the five major
IT trends we can expect:
Artificial intelligence spurs the reinvention of IT
Artificial intelligence will evolve IT by seeing
predictive analytics replace manually intensive activities with intelligent
automation. This evolution has been coined AIOps. This will allow organizations
to leverage data and AI to quickly identify problems, provide recommendations
on how to resolve existing issues, streamline automation with self-service and
self-recovery capabilities, and predict future outcomes to forecast costs.
AIOps will take IT operations analytics (ITOA) to the next level by
automatically applying insights to ensure high performing IT environments are
proactively making decisions that ultimately improve the health of the
business.
DevOps is a must for the business: development velocity or bust
DevOps represents a way to not only deliver
digital services faster, but also to do it more efficiently, and better engage
the engineering and operations talent of the team. To achieve the velocity,
quality and business impact promised with DevOps, organizations will continue
to adopt new staffing approaches and new technologies that empower teams and
enable agility. Having a handle on DevOps initiatives will be a differentiator
for executives. As board level conversations center around speed and
competitiveness, being able to point to successful implementations of DevOps
initiatives and having data to demonstrate their impact will be key.
DevSecOps is the next frontier
To meet increasing expectations for governance,
and audit and compliance requirements, all while maintaining development
velocity, many teams will embrace DevSecOps. This means developers will have a
larger role and more accountability for ensuring the security of their
applications and the data they process. Security will become a standard
requirement for building enterprise-class services and applications. To enable
this increasingly collaborative approach, everyone involved - developers,
release managers, application specialists, operations and security teams - will
need to work with a single source of truth, using that data to achieve the
security objectives most relevant for their roles.
No more boundaries - transparency between companies
With new "composable" approaches to delivering
business services including SaaS, containerization and APIs, traditional
concepts around how a company delivers and operates applications no longer
apply. To thrive in today's competitive environment, organizations must
collaborate with third parties to enable development velocity and provide
service reliability, requiring IT operations to gain visibility into myriad
internal and external services, while providing greater transparency through
operational information shared both inside and outside the firewall.
A new breed of IT Ops
With the rise of continuous delivery and DevOps,
a new breed of IT operations professionals is defining how services are
delivered and managed. As comfortable with Python and Ruby as with
configuration and capacity, they are leading the way in areas like systems
automation, architectural flexibility, developer empowerment and site
reliability to deliver better applications faster and with an exceptional user
experience. As such, the Site Reliability Engineer role will become mainstream
as many professionals refresh their software development skillsets so they can
collaborate more effectively with developers.
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About the Author
Rick Fitz has served as Splunk's
senior vice president, IT Markets since 2015. Prior to this role, Rick served
as Splunk's vice president of IT Markets, from 2014 to 2015. Prior to joining
Splunk, he served as vice president of product strategy and management at
MarkMonitor, a Thomson Reuters company, from 2013 to 2014. From 2008 to 2013,
he served as senior vice president of product management at CA Technologies, a
software company. Previously, Rick served in a variety of senior management
positions at Network General, BMC Software, Peregrine Corporation and Remedy
Corporation. He holds a BSCE degree from University of the Pacific and an
M.B.A. from Golden Gate University.