At a conference in Sydney, Australia this week, Gartner analysts highlighted four trends impacting cloud, data centre and edge infrastructure in 2023 as infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams navigate economic headwinds.

2023, according to Gartner VP analyst Paul Delory, “won’t be a year to realize grand ambitions, but it marks a moment to refocus, retool and rethink your infrastructure.”

He added, “in every crisis lies opportunity, and in this case, the chance to make positive changes that may be long overdue.”

The four trends, according to Gartner, are:

I&O teams will revisit hastily assembled and poorly architected cloud infrastructure to make it more efficient, resilient and cost-effective. 

The key to this is to eliminate redundant, overbuilt and unused cloud infrastructure, Gartner stressed, adding that companies will look to use and modernize cloud infrastructure to mitigate supply chain disruptions.

Gartner added that 65 per cent of application workloads will be optimal or ready for cloud delivery by 2027, up from 45 per cent in 2022.

2. I&O teams will evaluate new kinds of infrastructure as new application architectures emerge. 

These new infrastructures include edge infrastructure for data-intensive use cases, non-x86 architectures for specialized workloads, serverless edge architectures, and 5G mobile service.

I&O teams must assess these alternative options with care, Gartner said, notably in the face of time, talent, and resource constraints.

3. I&O teams will apply cloud-like service centricity and economic models to on-premises infrastructure as data centers shrink and migrate to platform-based colocation providers.

According to Gartner, 35 per cent of data center infrastructure will be managed from a cloud-based control plane by 2027, from less than 10 per cent in 2022.

4. I&O teams will make operations skills growth their highest priority in 2023. 

They will likely be encouraged to take on new roles as site reliability engineers or subject matter expert consultants for developer teams and business units.

Skills shortage remains the biggest barrier to infrastructure modernization initiatives, but Gartner predicts 60 per cent of data center infrastructure teams will have relevant automation and cloud skills by 2027, up from 30 per cent in 2022.

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