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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