As IT Infrastructure Changes Dramatically With The Advancement of Cloud and Edge Innovations, Smart Investments Matter

Technology powers nearly every aspect of today’s businesses, from an individual employee’s work to operations to goods and services. When properly networked, technology can be optimized to improve communication, create efficiencies and increase productivity. Because of this new reliance on digitization, businesses are putting extra emphasis on their IT infrastructure.

IT infrastructure are the components required to operate and manage enterprise IT environments. These components include hardware, software, networking components, an operating system (OS), and data storage, all of which are used to deliver IT services and solutions. IT infrastructure can be deployed within a cloud computing system or within an organization’s own facilities.

“If an IT infrastructure is flexible, reliable, and secure, it can help an enterprise meet its goals and provide a competitive edge in the market,” said David Walsh, CEO, and Co-Founder at XChangePoint. “Alternatively, if an IT infrastructure isn’t properly implemented, businesses can face connectivity, productivity, and security issues—like system disruptions and breaches. Overall, having a properly implemented infrastructure can be an important factor today in whether a business is profitable or not.”

Furthermore, with companies making IT infrastructure a priority, growth has also been seen in IT infrastructure adjacent markets, such as with IT infrastructure monitoring. Infrastructure monitoring is used to collect health and performance data from servers, virtual machines, containers, databases, and other back-end components in a tech stack. Engineers can use an infrastructure monitoring tool to visualize, analyze, and alert on metrics and understand whether a back-end issue impacts users.

Recently, according to a report by Persistence Research, the global IT infrastructure monitoring market reached USD 18.1 billion in 2021. On top of this, The global IT infrastructure monitoring market is estimated to accelerate at a high CAGR of 13.6% over the forecast period (2022-2031). As such, the market is set to expand around 3.6X and close in on a valuation of US$ 64.5 Bn by 2031.

“IT infrastructure is becoming more complex, larger, and more distributed, as many organizations are adopting advanced technologies. IT departments are upgrading existing systems to make them capable of adapting to hardware changes, support machine virtualization, and run applications across disparate data centers,” said Walsh. “But an organization’s applications and services can only work well for users when the underlying back-end infrastructure is healthy. Infrastructure monitoring allows engineers to spot and prevent problems anywhere in the back-end, which minimizes downtime and service degradation for users.”

Of course, the growth of IT infrastructure monitoring goes hand in hand with the growth of IT infrastructure adoption; it’s not the only thing responsible for the recent and predicted continued growth. Businesses are also starting to realize the benefits IT infrastructure monitoring offers when it comes to optimizing the use of technology.

To start, infrastructure monitoring can help troubleshoot performance issues and is commonly used to prevent incidents from escalating into outages. An infrastructure monitoring tool can show which hosts, containers, or other back-end components failed or experienced latency during an incident. When an outage does occur, engineers can determine which hosts or containers were responsible. This helps teams resolve support tickets and address customer-facing issues.

Also, as brought up earlier, infrastructure monitoring aids in forecasting back-end requirements. Organizations can predict future resource consumption by reviewing historical infrastructure metrics. For example, if certain hosts were under-provisioned during a recent product launch, you can configure more CPU and memory in the future during similar events to reduce strain on key systems and reduce the likelihood of revenue-draining outages.

Overall, as the world continues to become more digital with every passing day and organizations adopt more cloud-native technologies, IT infrastructure is becoming increasingly more distributed, meaning organizations must align business objectives and end-user experience with the availability and performance of the IT infrastructure. For many businesses, this shift will require infrastructure monitoring to ensure all their components work together across cloud environments, operating systems, storage, servers, virtualized systems, and more.

“IT is advancing blazingly fast. To keep up with architectural changes and hybrid environments, it’s more important than ever to maintain efficient infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting,” said Walsh. “Adding to the complexity is the increase of distributed systems, comprising many components and services. For IT teams to effectively manage monitoring modern infrastructure, it’s necessary to have the right practices and tools in place that enable teams to do their jobs as quickly as possible with fewer resources.”

Originally published on Cloud Computing Magazine