Key Takeaways

• Immerse yourselves in the organization        
  • “Our data shows that at least 84% of companies and 59% of government entities have set up “fusion teams” — and 43% already report outside IT to be closer to the point of value delivery.”
  • “Organizations operating with a distributed and simultaneous approach are 2.5 times faster than organizations that run initiatives in one centrally managed IT team.”

• Accelerate the adoption of automation and platform engineering
  • “Adopting a platform engineering approach is vital. I&O leaders use platform engineering to deliver shared infrastructure platforms"

  • While Gartner predicts that by 2025, 70% of new applications will be developed with low-code/no-code approaches, platform engineering helps I&O leaders use this trend to their advantage.

• Retool your I&O workforce
  • “Develop the right skills in your workforce, empowering them, and putting them in the right spots at the right times.”

• Build an innovative engine
  
  • “Consider an innovation lab as your innovation engine that draws in new technologies, tests and evaluates them. Then generate the best of the best candidates for further development and implementation.”
  • “Design matters. Build your innovation engine right, and it will drive you I&O forward.”

Key Takeaways

• VMs virtualize an entire computer and manage capacity by creating and moving VMs.

• Containers: this method virtualizes an operating system (OS) user space, allowing multiple user space instances to share a single OS kernel. 

• Serverless: this method virtualizes the application so that individual functions of the application are bound to resources as needed.

• Follow three step to select the appropriate virtualization method for deploying applications in the cloud:
  
  • Start with a broad classification of the application that will be deployed.
  • Identify strategic considerations for hosting the application.
  • Refine the choices based on tactical considerations.

• “With existing applications, identify opportunities for rehosting to improve life cycle management and revising for distributed computing.”

• "With new applications, optimize for cloud-native architecture attributes when possible:
  • Modularity, programmability, elasticity, and resiliency.”

• “With deployments in public cloud, take maximum advantage of native platform capabilities while balancing risk of lock-in.”

Key Takeaways

• “The edge is the physical location where things and people connect with the networked digital world. Edge computing is part of a distributed computing topology where information processing is located close to the edge.”

• “Through 2025, 50% of edge computing solutions deployed without an enterprise edge computing strategy in place will fail to meet goals in deployment time, functionality and/or cost.”

• “There are five elements to an effective edge computing strategic plan: Establishing the vision, determining use cases, identifying and managing risks, building and maintaining standards, and managing execution.” 

• “For the foundation of an edge computing strategy, understand enterprise strategies that will require edge computing to be successful, and ensure the strategies are linked.”

• “There are four imperatives driving computing to the edge: Latency, data gravity, semi-autonomy and privacy and security.”

• “Identify how the drivers of edge computing relate to your industry and business – for example, health care is very focused on privacy/security while defense is focused on semi-autonomy.”

• “Proofs of concept (POCs) are important, especially with the huge number of first-of-a-kind deployments or highly competitive solutions. The edge computing strategy should include how to best test the boundary limits of a POC.”