The coronavirus pandemic has drastically changed the way we operate businesses. While some companies were slowly transitioning to the option of remote work, that transition has accelerated significantly. Today, it is not feasible for all team members to work in-office. As a result, IT innovation is booming, and organizations are rushing to optimize their technology infrastructure and operations to keep up. By implementing critical technical solutions such as cloud computing, remote software management, and more, you can achieve end-to-end optimization. In decentralizing your operations, remote work is achievable and optimal. As we move further in 2021, several trends are anticipated to revolutionize the IT industry, and your organization needs to prepare for them. 
Remote Operations
Gartner estimates that 48% of employees will continue to work from home, even after the pandemic comes to an end. With nearly half of an organization's workforce working remotely, companies need to strengthen their IT department and remote capabilities. Now more than ever, it is necessary for offices to develop flexible and resilient organizations that enable team members to work and customers to access services from any location. Deploying business across distributed infrastructures is essential, so remote compatibility is a must-have.
The traditional workplace structure is growing outdated. For operations to succeed post-pandemic, they must incorporate the flexibility that remote work offers. Decentralizing staff and software will allow team members to work in an environment most comfortable to them. Furthermore, developing your remote operations will open your organization up to broader talent choices, making yourself available to skilled professionals in any location. This is also an excellent benefit for customers and shareholders, providing them access to data and services in real-time from any location. With remote capabilities, you will support your current staff while growing your team member and customer base.
Operational Continuity
To manage these remote operations, your IT systems must be able to support geographically dispersed customers and employees. To achieve this, you must develop operational continuity; IT services providing automated deployments and minimal-touch maintenance. These features will enable you to support remote users with the help of automation tools. These will deploy new compute resources, reduce deployment time, and deliver greater data agility. It is predicted that by 2025, 60% of organizations will implement automation tools in their IT operations. Your organization will achieve increased efficiency and optimized workload deployment between cloud computing, AI, and IoT software. This will drastically enhance data transfers and daily operational tasks, ensuring that your team members work with complete visibility and efficiency.
Core Modernization
Maintaining core operations needs to be viewed as an ongoing process, not a one-time project. Because of this, you must modernize the core of your business. This is the process of updating IT applications and infrastructure, either on-premise or in the cloud, to enable the delivery of digital applications and operations. For you to truly optimize your IT infrastructure and operations, they must include end-to-end integration and visibility. All aspects of your software and IT systems must be connected, and it should begin with your core operations. Without updated core infrastructure, all other systems will be less than optimal.
Once modernized, your infrastructure will be able to handle new and advanced application capabilities, such as cloud computing. This will allow remote access to all data and software and pave the way for you to implement even more innovative technology. Using the cloud as an overarching IT system, you will connect all IT operations in your organization, ensuring that they work cohesively to achieve efficiency and visibility. Creating a modernization plan will allow you to develop a realistic timeline with progressive goals to work up to. Utilizing the help of an IT provider, they will help you establish the best route transition to a modern operating system.
Optimal Infrastructure
This year, the optimal infrastructure for an organization is changing. While cloud computing has already revolutionized the IT industry, 2021 will take it one step further. Through integrating advanced data centers and edge computing, the cloud capabilities available today will be more accessible and robust than ever. Edge computing distributes the cloud to companies, providing faster access to data through minimizing the proximity between companies and their data centers. With increasingly large volumes of data being transferred into the cloud, companies are struggling to manage it. Edge computing optimizes these data transfers, increasing your bandwidth to bring you larger volumes of data at higher speeds.
With quicker access to data, your team will have a more comprehensive data analysis, creating the opportunity for deeper insights, improved response time, and an enhanced customer experience. Distributed cloud infrastructure is the key to operational optimization – enabling software to work in the right place at the right time. This is highly pertinent to organizations looking to accommodate remote work. With advanced speed and access to data, your team members will not only be able to work remotely, but they will do so efficiently and without disruption.
Critical Skills
As organizations continue to implement highly advanced technologies, the required skill-set of team members is growing. By 2022, IT organizations should expect to hire an increasing number of high-priority skills in their workplace. In preparation, management should start hiring for these skills now, ensuring that they will have expert team members ready once new technology and software are implemented. As IT business environments adapt, the professionals within them should too. The focus in the IT industry is shifting from infrastructure roles to collective and critical skills. While it is still vital for team members to develop hard skills such as data analytics, software development, and machine learning, they need to take it one step further. Leadership skills are essential to any role, but growing so in IT.
With the implementation of so much technology at once, organizations need experts to lead others in understanding and learning. Communication skills are also vital, ensuring that team members clearly understand their responsibilities and can communicate problems and solutions as needed. Additionally, cybersecurity is a growing threat as the IT industry moves to the cloud. Having a solid understanding of this will ensure that all operations are carried out with data security in mind. Your organization should look to cultivate collaboration in the workplace, ensuring that team members can work as cohesively as the systems they operate.
Preparing your organization for the future of IT will give you a significant competitive advantage. With optimized technology such as cloud and edge computing, AI, and IoT software, in addition to knowledgeable and experienced team members, you will achieve the efficiency and visibility necessary to succeed. Times are changing, and businesses must keep up in order to satisfy the growing needs of their customers. In increasing the speed, transparency, and access to vital data, your IT operations will run smoothly, pleasing customers and simplifying processes. It is no longer acceptable to have limited data access – in 2021, flexibility is everything. Allowing your team members and customers remote operations capabilities, attained through the implementation of optimal IT infrastructure, will deliver the flexibility required for modernization. Following the trends of this year and equipping yourself with a strong IT solutions provider, the transition to optimized IT infrastructure and operations will be easier than ever before.
