Predictions: 2022 will be the year to modernize IT or die

Don’t miss our first prediction: AIOps goes mainstream, empowering hyper automation and accelerated innovation. Get a sneak peek at them all in our infographic.

Here is our second prediction…

2022 will be the year to modernize IT or die

Executive teams everywhere now recognize that if they don’t modernize their IT infrastructure, they will quickly lose out in the marketplace. If the years 2020 and 2021 called for accelerated digital transformation, 2022 will be the year we will see innovation on steroids. The stakes have never been higher as transformed companies will outpace and outperform others.

Remote work trends are set to continue in 2022 — only now with a tighter focus on IT architectures. This year, companies are transitioning from simply enabling distributed workforces to making hybrid business models truly efficient as the new permanent. As they do, all eyes will be on security and the network’s capacity to deliver perfect availability and throughput in support of today’s bigger demands.

Gone are the days of simply tending to the customer experience, now IT teams must satisfy the “total experience” i.e. the larger task of delivering services across every user group (customers, employees, users), every application, every location, and every device — no matter how users are connecting to corporate systems and services.

This wider scope of responsibilities comes with a backdrop of increasingly complex IT environments that have already stretched IT resources to the brink. Consider that IT teams spend 49% of their time on monitoring application performance with 48% of that time troubleshooting the network. That’s like a painter spending half his time washing his paint brushes. This reality doesn’t give hybrid work, “total experiences,” or digital transformation a fighting chance, which explains the urgency of modernization including software-defined networks, SD-WAN, SASE, AI, as well as cloud migration and virtualization.

IT architectures must be scalable, flexible, and secure, not to mention optimized for AI with real-time machine learning and management capabilities. Agile IT requires a network and cloud platform with innate security and built entirely on software-defined principals. In fact, studies show just how imperative a modern infrastructure is for companies needing to innovate or die:

• 46% if IT leaders claim the pandemic has accelerated their timeline for SD-WAN, and 69% of business leaders plan to increase their financial commitments to digital transformation in response to the pandemic
• Top investments to help prepare for AIOps technologies include a software-defined network modernization and virtualization (73%) and cloud migration (67%)
• By 2022, 70% of all organizations will have accelerated use of digital technologies
• Nearly two-thirds of business leaders believe that those who don’t digitize in the next 5 years will be “doomed,” according to the 2021 Deloitte Digital Transformation Executive Survey

The network will continue to take center stage as the platform and technical foundation for business continuity in today’s world where the corporate network is user-, location- and device-independent. Saving the company from imminent death, IT leaders and their infrastructures will become the champions of the enterprise in 2022. They will actually come out stronger on the other side of the pandemic. Finally, now all legacy networks will get modernized, virtualized, and software-defined.

Related resources and recommended reading

• Nemertes: Work-from-Anywhere Done Right – Using SASE to ensure security and application performance for remote and hybrid workforces
• Forrester: COVID-19 Highlights the Business Case for Extending SD-WAN to Remote Workers
• Altman Solon: State of SD-WAN Study
• ZK Research: SASE Buyer’s Guide

Don’t miss our other predictions

• AIOps goes mainstream, empowering hyper automation and accelerated innovation
• Convergence and co-creation trends will give birth to open-innovation ecosystems