From the core of IT Operations (IT OPs) to the essence of development – DevOps has become the de facto term to describe the ongoing competencies of two interconnected and essential ecosystems—development and operations. Highly agile, competent and flexible IT Ops teams are critical to sustainable business growth. It’s IT Ops that supports turning potential into definitive business value, a crucial skill that ensures the business is as capable of leveraging automation as it is in engaging with its vibrant developer community. However, as the world shifts on its axis, IT Ops is becoming even more invaluable as the organisation struggles with balancing innovation with even more restrictions around budget and time. 

Some days it may feel like the role of developers is to make stuff that destroys your stuff – the bedrock of servers, websites and databases that you administer. Whilst developers create some of these things, there is little point if the environment that you administer can’t integrate them and keep them secure and functioning.

Does this sound familiar? In a recent interaction I had with a medical lab (that shall remain nameless) regarding a blood test, I had a less-than-optimal experience navigating their system. Let’s call it my customer experience.

Business uncertainty has made it nearly impossible to develop long-term IT strategies because of funding concerns, according to a recent survey by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).

It took 40 years for the world to create the nearly 500 million apps in existence today. Yet such is the pace of change that the same number is expected to be created in the next three years alone. Just as apps have become essential tools in our daily lives, they have become vital interfaces for businesses to interact with their customers.

Strategy, like democracy and sustainability, has a “too many friends” problem. Everyone knows it’s a good thing and everyone claims to be doing it—but when you look a little deeper, things are rarely as complete as they initially appear to be.

At CDW, we’ve noticed that for many IT leaders trying to plot a future course for their organisations through murky waters, a high-level business strategy sometimes raises questions, such as how do we implement this?

As edge environments become more critical to business success, maintaining the power, cooling and management needs should be top of mind. 

With more people working remotely, end users must have faster access to critical information. Edge environments move that critical information closer to the end user, thus making them more efficient. This is the same concept streaming services use to distribute content to their users.