8 trends in infrastructure development in 2018

Cloud computing is gradually gaining favor among enterprises, but enterprise-wide IT infrastructure remains a key component of enterprise IT strategy. According to Interop ITX and InformationWeek 2018 State of Infrastructure Research, enterprises are still investing in data center, storage, and network infrastructure to develop digital strategies.

The survey was conducted on 150 IT leaders and practitioners in the industry. The report showed that 24% of respondents said their organizations plan to increase IT infrastructure spending by more than 10% next year, 21% plan to spend 5%-10% more on IT infrastructure than last year, and 15% hope that infrastructure investment will not exceed 5%.

27% of the respondents said their organizations plan to increase IT infrastructure construction or support to bring new business growth opportunities, and 30% of the respondents believe that increasing labor demand is something that attaches importance to infrastructure development.

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The report shows that enterprises are investing in a variety of technologies to help them achieve their digital goals and keep up with changing needs. Storage is an important area for enterprises because storage must keep up with the pace of data development. The survey shows that the rapid growth of data and data storage is the biggest factor driving changes in IT infrastructure.

Enterprises are also working to improve network security, increase bandwidth, add more servers to their data centers, and build WLANs. At the same time, they see many challenges facing modern infrastructure, including implementation costs, lack of professional personnel, and security issues.

Infrastructure investment growth

In the Interop ITX and InformationWeek Infrastructure Survey, 5% of respondents said their organization will spend less on IT infrastructure in the next few years compared to the past 12 months, and 45% of respondents expect to invest more in infrastructure. Obviously, IT infrastructure is key to the digital transformation planning of enterprises. 30% of respondents expect infrastructure spending to remain stable.

Meeting storage needs

Regarding the infrastructure that enterprises plan to invest in, 21% of respondents said that they will purchase storage hardware in the next 12 months, which will keep pace with the growth of network hardware and servers, with an increase of about 19%. Encryption and solid-state storage are the top two products purchased for storage infrastructure, and the survey also shows that enterprises have a strong interest in software-defined storage.

Network investment

By far the biggest driver for investment in network technology is improved security, with the top investment focus for the next 12 months being network security, with 59% of respondents listing it as one of their top three priorities for enterprise network business investment, followed by high-speed Ethernet at 29%, indicating that enterprises are experiencing an increasing demand for bandwidth.

Data Center Investment

Despite the continuous development of cloud computing, enterprise data centers will remain vibrant and enterprises will continue to support and invest in data centers. 31% of respondents said that they will spend more than 50% of their IT budget on data center infrastructure, hardware and operations. 35% of respondents said that data center spending will remain stable in the next 12 months, and 54% of respondents said that spending will increase by more than 5%. In the data center field, enterprise investment will mainly focus on servers, with 44% of respondents listing it as the main investment focus, followed by server virtualization and public cloud services, accounting for 31%.

Converged and Hyperconverged Infrastructure

As enterprises hope to simplify IT operations, converged infrastructure, especially hyper-converged infrastructure, will become the main trend in the development of data centers. These integrated technologies are expected to speed up deployment and simplify management. According to research by InteropITX and InformationWeek, 65% of respondents said they are using, planning to use, or looking for converged or hyper-converged infrastructure, but at the same time, 20% of respondents are not interested in it. Virtual desktop infrastructure is a technology area that 65% of respondents seeking converged infrastructure and hyper-converged infrastructure are more interested in, followed by database storage and high-performance technology, accounting for 28%.

Investment in wireless field

Wireless networks have become critical to IT infrastructure, and research shows that companies are continuing to build WLANs to keep up with growing demand. In the next two years, 61% of respondents said wireless communications will increase significantly (19%), with the highest rate reaching 42%. In the next 12 months, the focus of wireless technology that companies plan to invest in is wireless access points (47%), and 39% of respondents said they plan to invest in wireless/mobile security, such as managing BYOD devices.

Cloud computing applications

Despite investments in traditional data center areas, cloud computing has become one of the options for enterprises. As mentioned earlier, public cloud services related to server virtualization are the second largest choice for enterprise investment. Organizations are also keen to implement cloud computing models internally. 22% of respondents said that private cloud is a top priority for their company, and many companies are already using private cloud. Only 10% of users said that they did not see any technical value from cloud computing. Many companies use cloud storage as an alternative. Respondents to this survey said they use cloud storage for a variety of reasons: backup and recovery (37%), archive (31%), application storage (30%) and general storage (29%).

IT Challenges

Of course, IT implementation is not easy, and organizations will face some obstacles in modernizing their infrastructure. 62% of IT leaders said that the cost of implementing IT infrastructure is the biggest factor inhibiting digital transformation, followed by the professional level of employees (46%), and security issues followed closely at 43%.