Two Gartner 2021 strategic tech trends ITOps should pay close attention to

3 min read

by Mohan Kompella | Nov 18, 2020

Gartner recently released their top strategic technology trends for 2021. It’s no surprise that these trends reflect what many of us and our organizations have been experiencing, dealing with ongoing challenges during this global pandemic.

Gartner’s trends fall along three main themes:

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People centricity: Despite the pandemic changing how many people work and interact with organizations, people are still at the center of all business — and they need digitalized processes to function in today’s environment.

Location independence: COVID-19 has shifted where employees, customers, suppliers and organizational ecosystems physically exist. Location independence requires a technology shift to support this new version of business.

Resilient delivery: Whether a pandemic or a recession, volatility exists in the world.

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In other words, organizations that are flexible and prepared to pivot and adapt – from both a people perspective, and a technology perspective – are those that will not only survive but also succeed in this new reality.

Within these three themes Gartner lists nine strategic trends, two of which stand out prominently for today’s IT Operations teams. These two trends also closely mirror what enterprises said was top of mind for them this year, when they turned to BigPanda.

Anywhere Operations

Gartner defines Anywhere Operations as an “IT operating model designed to support customers everywhere, enable employees everywhere and manage the deployment of business services across distributed infrastructure”. Specifically, Gartner discusses the need for remote collaboration capabilities, secure remote access, SaaS management platforms and viable analytics to quantify the quality of work in dispersed, remote environments.

This trend closely mirrors one of the top five enterprise initiatives that BigPanda solves for (which we call “transformation triggers”): the ability to support remote IT operations and distributed teams.

BigPanda’s highly-scalable SaaS based platform serves enterprises with millions of IT alerts, dozens of remote teams and thousands of users. It brings together all the critical data that IT Ops, NOC, DevOps and SRE need to resolve incidents: alerts, changes & topology data, into a single platform. Enterprises are also well served by BigPanda’s ability to provide operations teams with all the communication and collaboration options they need to rapidly collaborate on, and resolve, incidents and outages.

Hyperautomation

Gartner describes Hyperautomation as “a process in which businesses automate as many business and IT processes as possible using tools like AI, machine learning, event-driven software, robotic process automation, and other types of decision process and task automation tools”. Gartner views Hyperautomation as key to both digital operational excellence and operational resiliency, stating that organizations should automate tasks and processes as well as orchestrate automation across functional areas.

Aligned to this trend is another transformation trigger that BigPanda solves for: automation and AIOps. BigPanda believes that automation is critical, but at the same time, that enterprises and their IT Operations teams should be able to successfully adopt AI/ML-enabled automation at their own pace. BigPanda facilitates this by using its proprietary Open Box Machine Learning technology to automate different aspects of the incident management lifecycle such as detection, notification and ticketing.

With 2021 just around the corner, it’s good to keep Gartner’s advice from this report in mind: “The unprecedented socioeconomic challenges of 2020 demand the organizational plasticity to transform and compose the future”.

Adapting to the new normal of dispersed, hybrid and constantly changing IT Ops is key for success, and BigPanda is a partner to many leading enterprises in this journey. Contact us to learn how we can help you.