Gone are the days when moving simple business logic and data entry to software would give IT enterprises a competitive advantage. Now, enterprises must incorporate advanced intelligence (e.g.- AI/ML) into their business processes and extract valuable insights from an ever-increasing deluge of data. On top of that, the cost pressure on IT to do more with less remains constant. As a result, traditional approaches to infrastructure are unable to support these demands.

Software-Defined Infrastructure (SDI) is an emerging approach to meet these demands with implications going beyond technology into the organization. Earlier approaches to infrastructure had strict boundaries between IT infrastructure (typically hardware) and applications. Applications didn’t change their underlying infrastructure. And at the same time, there were organizational silos of application developers and IT operators. Starting with the rise of virtualization and Infrastructure-as-a-Service, this barrier began to break down for compute workloads. Now nearly all aspects of a data-center – storage, networking, etc. – can be defined via software (independent of any underlying hardware). This has paved way for entirely new ways of architecting applications: micro-services or cloud-native applications. DevOps, a new hybrid role, has also emerged and further blurs the line between application developers and IT operators.

There are challenges standing in the way of SDI adoption and the modern applications they enable. For instance, as applications become more distributed across a greater number of components, orchestration and system automation become more difficult. Management also becomes increasingly complex as IT operators are challenged with managing multiple SDI environments, spanning on-premises and, increasingly, multiple public cloud providers.

Nevertheless, the adoption of SDI and microservices have enabled enterprises to receive not only greater IT and developer agility, but also business agility and a real competitive advantage. It’s no coincidence that many of today’s leading enterprises have adopted this approach: from Netflix, Google, Amazon, eBay and Uber in technology to Comcast Cable and Capital One beyond.

Join us for a session in the cloud where we will explore all of this and more.