Any claim that infrastructure is dead may be deliberately cheeky, but it’s not too much of an exaggeration. As we continue to move toward a services-based IT economy, companies trade in self-administered servers for services, and delegate the administration of infrastructure to IT managed service and cloud providers. 

In reality, infrastructure is absolutely NOT dying; it is becoming far less visible. In fact, there is more infrastructure in use than ever. Aided significantly by cloud platform services from Google, AWS and Microsoft who now provide redundant systems at a cost significantly lower than possible within the enterprise.  

The administration of these infrastructures are increasingly being delegated to a smaller group of skilled administrators — helped by ever improving tools and automation.

Multicloud

Multicloud usage (that is the use of multiple cloud systems from different vendors) is rising (recent estimates say top 84% of companies are using this approach), but significantly, the rationale is no longer for the original reasons of redundancy or the avoidance of vendor lock–in. 

Companies are now picking the best solution for their needs, e.g. Microsoft 365 for collaboration, Salesforce for CRM, Datadog for monitoring, and Google, Microsoft and Amazon for infrastructure hosting. Once organisations start consuming multiple services that solve individual problems, it’s no longer a problem of infrastructure but of integration. 

The Rise in Integration  

We are seeing more and more companies looking to create applications that are configured with automated workflows on the fly. This involves the chaining together of very different services managed by different providers. The resulting workflow has the potential to implement the best-of-breed in each category based on costs and functionality and provides a single automated cloud native solution. 

The ability to leverage domain experts who offer their products and services via APIs has allowed teams to build increasingly powerful networked applications, with fewer resources. Developers can consume and integrate other services for tasks — including authentication and identity, payments, content management, data services, search, and much more.

A heightened customer perspective 

The pandemic has accelerated the need for companies to increase their ability to interact with their customers digitally, by some estimates (Mckinsey 2020) the digital channel now accounts for 60% of interaction – a rise of 50% in the last 12 months  

For these reasons, companies not only have to move faster, but they have to adopt processes and tooling that enable them to move faster —to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. That includes adopting cloud services that reduce the time to value and adding other capabilities — like integration-and workflow. At the end of the day, companies need to focus their energy on differentiated services that provide an advantage to their company. Moving to a more service –centric approach to developing and maintaining digital experiences is the pathway to a better and more agile online presence.