Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022.  Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

What's in Store for ITOps?

By Nicholas Colyer, Staff Product Manager and Jay Goodman, Director of Product Marketing, Automox

In 2021, we saw digital transformation, automation, cloud, and AI / ML as prominent themes across IT operations. As businesses plan for another year of uncertainty, 2022 will be a case of "same but different."

Where 2021 was the year of automating complex business tasks, automation will be both a catalyst and success story in 2022, driving innovation, efficiency, and business strategy acceleration. Digital transformation and cloud adoption will continue to be accelerated by pandemic-driven remote work, which is now the prevailing model. More companies will modernize their CX. And the complexities of cloud will continue to drive innovation and adoption of better visibility / monitoring tools. Automation will be a winning use case for AI/ML, as it will play a bigger role in assisting teams by automating IT processes.

If this year has taught us anything, it's that constant improvement, iteration, and evolution are the keys to continuity in these uncertain times. With every business now being a digital one, everyone must be online, everywhere, at all times. This has massively raised the stakes when it comes to monitoring, analyzing, and securing IT infrastructure.

In 2022, these challenges will continue to unfold. Labor shortages will continue to impact every industry, including essential IT vendors and MSPs. Winning businesses will be those that can attract and retain technical talent - but it needs to go a step further. Tech teams have a closer seat at the table than ever before when it comes to determining long-term business strategy and success. C-suites must empower - and listen to - these tech teams to have a shot at keeping their heads above the rising tide of ransomware, cloud outages, and beyond.

Automox's Nicholas Colyer and Jay Goodman outline some key ITOps trends for 2022, including the ramifications of not investing in ITOps technologies, rapid growth of MSPs, and cloud shifts in ITOps and SecOps.

Supply chain will see the impact of on-prem operational risks

The decision to manage legacy on-premise systems has the overhead of scaling and lifecycle maintenance today; however, moving into 2022, organizations that don't invest in ITOps technologies could potentially expose themselves to the operational risk of supply-chain uncertainties in the forward-looking future. Political tensions in Asia, along with new COVID-19 variants, could continue to stretch supply vs demand. Cloud-native vendors benefit from agreements with providers for preferred pricing and capacity reservation, which means customers can rely on their service during troubled times. - Nicholas Colyer, Staff Product Manager

ITOps' strain will be MSPs' gain

IT teams are already stretched thin, and with more and more organizations both emerging and transitioning more to a digital world for traditionally non-digital industries, we will see a massive shortage in IT professionals globally. This will lead to highly competitive hiring and dramatic growth in MSPs. MSPs have long been a tool to manage IT infrastructure for organizations, and 2022 will be no different. The big shift will be an increasing number of mid-commercial to mid-enterprise that begin to use MSPs as an augmentation to their existing IT teams as hiring becomes a problem. Teams will also take advantage of automation more than ever before as a way to cope in the short term, while transitioning the way IT operations is done in the long term. - Jay Goodman, Director, Product Marketing

2022 will further expose lack of employee mental health and safety solutions

Mental health and safety have become increasingly top-of-mind for organizations, yet today there are few solutions that can offer peer-reviewed, scientifically validated insight into employee mental health status. Beyond immunization tracking tools for governmental mandates, behavioral tracking solutions do exist but are mostly oriented toward employee productivity, loathed by end-users as intrusive and an invasion of privacy. In 2022, this need will only continue to become more prevalent as the long-term impacts of the pandemic are still largely unknown and variant-based risks continue to be assessed. - Nicholas Colyer, Staff Product Manager

SecOps will complete the transition to cloud; ITOps is up next

Firewalls, CASB, web gateways, and other tools will see a transition to cloud infrastructure, as SecOps teams wind down their on-premise tools. As longer-term contracts for these tools come due over the next 12-18 months, this will be the next big wave for consolidation and transformation of tools to the cloud for SecOps. Once this is done, the focus will turn in earnest to ITOps tools and how organizations can leverage them to realize the gains seen from SecOps over the past 5 years. - Jay Goodman, Director, Product Marketing

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Nicholas Colyer, Staff Product Manager

Nick has 10+ years of experience in IT cybersecurity across a diverse range of roles. His breadth of experience allows him to connect with customers and drive successful outcomes.

Jay Goodman, Director of Product Marketing

Jay comes to Automox with 10+ years of experience working in cybersecurity and competitive intelligence. With a background in Economics, Jay can easily translate value into numbers.