The road of digital transformation will require a complete rethink on how companies approach the future and the role of devops.
Editor’s Note: With 2017 virtually upon us, RCR Wireless News has gathered predictions from across the mobile telecommunications space on what they expect to see in the new year.
The revised role of the CIO
In 2017, the role of the CIO will become more important than it’s ever been. Digital transformation is touching all aspects of business and as a result enterprises need to be aware that every system upgrade, connection or third-party application added to existing IT infrastructure will increase service delivery complexity, scale and operational risk.
It’s a situation that’s not only going to create headaches for IT teams, but could also have serious implications for the successful running of any business. In this environment it’s down to the CIO to manage the transition, maintain a sense of order and lay the foundations for the future. The CIO is uniquely placed to supervise any enterprise digital transformation strategy due to their unique understanding of IT infrastructure and how it can evolve to better serve business growth.
The long-term impact of digitization
Digitization has already had a profound impact on the factory floor and the number of jobs lost to automation over the past 30 years has now ticked over the 6 million mark in the U.S. alone. However, as we move into 2017, the role of digital transformation and automation on the global job market will start to shift.
The most recent Arbor Networks Infrastructure Security Report shows a dramatic growth in volumetric distributed denial of service attacks and how the “internet of things” is forever changing the threat landscape. The number of jobs in information security is going to see a significant spike as a result, demonstrating an area where digital transformation and automation will be responsible for creating more jobs rather than simply taking away from the overall pool of available positions.
Business assurance, the lifeblood of DX
It’s clear that IT infrastructure is what the digital economy depends on 24/7. Managing this digital transformation is highly strategic for business and IT leaders as a result, and service performance is one of the most important transformational metrics.
This has always been the case, but as we move into 2017, enterprises will recognize the increasing value of business assurance. Doing this the wrong way, relying on incoherent data and silo-specific tools will cost companies a lot of money when they are faced with service disruptions, sometimes running into millions of dollars an hour.
On the flip side, businesses will also recognize how accelerating digital transformation and assuring a consistent service delivery relies on a real-time information platform that supports comprehensive IT visibility, capable of producing unique insights into operations.
The devops chaos theory
As we move into 2017, development and operations principles will start to have much greater impact for large enterprises, with the true value of this methodology being identified through a new approach.
Faced with a production environment that differs substantially from the development environment, many large enterprises already depend on the devops methodology. However, as development velocity increases and the scale of the enterprise also increases, these businesses will develop a much greater reliance on devops principles in order to rein in the chaos associated with continuous development that’s being spurred on by automation.
In this environment, chaos (C) will become a function of both velocity (V) and scale (S). The hypothesis is that increase in velocity of new software releases and scale of development and operation organizations will result in the new devops equation for chaos of C=V*S^2. Since most chaos will manifest itself in production environments, it will become vital for enterprises to identify the level of constraint placed upon the operations team, helping to address what changes must be made and what technology must be introduced to prevent operations from becoming a bottleneck to the continuous development cycle.
Michael Segal is area VP for strategy at Netscout.
