In this ever-evolving IT world, changes come fast. New technologies come out almost every day. Technologies such as virtualization, IoT, and the cloud are shaping and changing the way we use IT by growing our infrastructures exponentially, which the bare-metal era never saw.
All these changes and exponential growth means that IT managers have a lot more to manage and far less time to train their staff to support these technologies, so many businesses can barely keep up with the pace. This can result in them becoming reluctant to adopt new technologies. But many have no choice but to adopt them for fear of becoming irrelevant and not being able to satisfy the demands of their customers. If their competitors have the advantage and deliver a better and faster service, they will likely go out of business.
Companies want to adopt these technologies as soon as possible, to gain an edge over their competitors, but new technologies often come with big learning curves. During this time, IT staff need to learn how to manage and maintain new systems, resulting in keeping critical systems and workloads available becoming a challenge. Not complying with our SLAs becomes a real threat; imagine a situation where a developer needs the operations team to apply a library patch to our dev environment systems in order to test a new release, and because our operations staff (or at least half of them) are in training, developers are tempted to bypass the standardized change-request process and apply the update themselves. Shadow IT in this type of situation is really common, and we need to avoid it at all costs. Shadow IT can make our company non-compliant with regulatory standards.
While IT leaders push to adopt new technologies, they are often left with very small and declining budgets to do this type of transformation. This also directly affects our critical systems and workloads because investment in system management declines and moves toward innovation. Moving toward innovation is not a bad thing, because it will eventually enable us to provide a better service, but it is important to understand that it also has consequences regarding the maintenance of our existing environments.
With new technology comes new infrastructure; mixed environments become more common every day, and it is crucial to understand how to manage these mixed environments in the best and most efficient way possible.