Gartner highlights four trends shaping enterprise cloud, edge and datacentre investments

Gartner has lifted the lid on the impact the downbeat conditions blighting economies across the globe are having on enterprise spending priorities where cloud and datacentre-related projects are concerned.

The analyst has pinpointed four trends playing out in 2023 where enterprise cloud, datacentre and edge environment infrastructure investments are concerned, as companies across the world look for ways to curb costs in the face of testing macroeconomic conditions.

“This won’t be a year to realise grand ambitions, but it marks a moment to refocus, retool and rethink your infrastructure,” said Paul Delory, vice-president analyst at Gartner. “In every crisis lies opportunity, and in this case, the chance to make positive changes that may be long overdue.”

The first trend called out by Gartner centres on enterprises seeking to optimise their existing cloud infrastructure deployments, which the organisation describes as being typically “ad hoc” and “poorly implemented”, with 2023 providing IT teams with an opportunity to right some wrongs where their off-premise setups are concerned.

“Infrastructure and operations [I&O] teams have an opportunity this year to revisit hastily assembled or poorly architected cloud infrastructure to make it more efficient, resilient and cost-effective,” said Gartner, in an advisory note.

“The focus of refactoring cloud infrastructure should be on optimising costs by eliminating redundant, overbuilt or unused cloud infrastructure; building business resilience rather than service-level redundancy; using cloud infrastructure as a way to mitigate supply chain disruptions; and modernising infrastructure.”

This year should also see I&O teams turn their attention to trying to meet the demand for new types of infrastructure, particularly when it comes to the provision of edge environments for data-intensive use cases.

This will require I&O teams to think beyond the traditional infrastructure approaches they may have taken in the past when trying to stand-up environments to run emerging use cases.

“Don’t revert to traditional methods or solutions just because they’ve worked well in the past,” said Delory. “Challenging periods are times to innovate and find new solutions to meet business demands.”

Against a backdrop of challenging economic conditions, enterprises are still prioritising projects that will enable them to downsize their datacentre footprints and move more of their workloads either to colocation or edge compute environments, said Gartner.

For this reason, it said enterprises should prioritise building cloud-native infrastructures in their datacentres, while working on projects that will allow them to migrate workloads to other environments with greater ease.

The fourth and final trend I&O teams will find themselves coming up against in 2023 is experiencing difficulties when trying to source people with the right skills to help them modernise their infrastructure. For this reason, it said 2023 is the year enterprises need to start prioritising organic skills growth if they want their digital transformation projects to succeed.

“I&O leaders must make operations skills growth their highest priority this year,” the Gartner advisory note added. “Encourage I&O professionals to take on new roles as site reliability engineers or subject matter expert consultants for developer teams and business units.”