Transforming IT infrastructure and operations to drive digital business

Once organizations have defined their future state — and Murray urged organizations to start with developing a public cloud strategy to determine which applications will be in the cloud — they should begin modernizing their infrastructure, he told the audience at the Gartner Catalyst conference. 

“Programmatic control is the key to enabling automation and automation is, of course, critical to addressing the disparity between the speed that we can deliver and execute in cloud, and improving our speed of execution on prem,” he said. 

Organizations will also need developers with the skills to take advantage of it, he said. Another piece of the automation equation when modernizing the infrastructure to gain speed is standardization, he said.

“We need to standardize around those programmatic building blocks, either Hyper-converged simplifies the complexity associated with establishing programmatic control and helps create a unified API for infrastructure, he said.

Organizations also need to consider how to uplevel their standardization, according to Murray. This is where containers come into play. The atomic unit of deployment is specific to an application and it abstracts much of the dependencies and complications that come with moving an application independent of its operating system, he explained.

“And if we can do that, now I have a construct that I can standardize around and deploy into cloud, into on prem, into off prem and give it straight to my developers and give them the ability to move quickly and deploy their applications,” he said.