3 Imperatives for IT Asset Management
About this time last year, the world started to change. It was mid-March when most offices asked employees to work from home, schools shut their doors to in-person learning and we all got to know our immediate families a lot better.
Thankfully, the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines is evidence we are likely starting to turn the corner on the pandemic. Despite that good news, we have been forever changed by 2020. Individually, many of us bought home workout equipment, became new pet owners and we learned how to make sourdough bread. Collectively, the workforce became much more distributed and businesses adapted to smarter ecommerce models while taking steps to digitally transform into a customer-first company.
Given all this change, how has your organization settled into 2021? Have you formed new success strategies?
In the Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021 report, Gartner reminds us the disruption of 2020 demands businesses find new ways to operate and drive growth going forward. They identify nine trends as opportunities for organizations to differentiate themselves and three are foundational to the evolution of IT and more specifically, asset management.
Distributed cloud
Gartner defines the distributed cloud as public cloud options for different physical locations. The public cloud provider operates their services at the point of need. This could include such offerings as on-premises public cloud, IoT edge cloud, metro-area community cloud (for smart cities), 5G mobile edge cloud and others.
When it comes to remote work, the cloud is vital for business continuity and productivity. While the various iterations of public clouds to come are interesting to consider, many organizations are still working on the move from on-premises legacy systems to the public cloud of any type. In 2020, we saw a seismic shift here and in 2021, it’s time to review all that you onboarded for the sake of getting work done and adjust as necessary. Do you have more than you need? Who is using what and for what purpose? Can some of the licenses be reharvested now that the dust has settled?
Intelligent composable business
Saying that the disruption in 2020 broke many business processes may seem like a serious understatement. But it did that and more and, according to Gartner, intelligent composable business is key to rebuilding. Decision making will need to change to include increasing autonomy and that means better access to information that is both modular and readily changeable when circumstances call for it.
For IT, this means complete visibility into your entire technology landscape both on-prem and in the cloud. It also means you have insights into usage, spend and vulnerabilities so that you can maximize your technology investments. To succeed in the years to come, developing this technology intelligence will be critical.
Hyperautomation
Hyperautomation is the automation of decision processes and tasks. Gartner also calls the predicted technology trend “irreversible and inevitable” and “the key to both digital operational excellence and operational resiliency for organizations.” The question then becomes, how far down the automation path have you traveled?
The key with automation is the output will be only as good as the data input and starting is often the hardest part. To effectively manage your IT consumption – from hardware to software, on-premises to the cloud – you need visibility into what you have, who’s using what and in what capacity. This is the kind of insight that lays the foundation for strong decision making.
Most would agree, the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t in our rearview mirror yet and uncertainty remains for 2021. The key is to remain nimble, yet informed, strategic yet flexible. If 2020 taught us anything, it’s to arm your organization with information and be ready to change course in a moment’s notice to adapt to whatever the next several months have in store.