Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2021 Americas: Day 1 Highlights

December 6, 2021

Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2021, Americas: Day 1 Highlights

We are bringing you news and highlights from the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference, taking place this week virtually in the Americas. Below is a collection of the key announcements and insights coming out of the conference.

On Day 1 from the conference, we are highlighting the Gartner Opening Keynote, the top trends impacting infrastructure and operations (I&O), and the fundamentals of distributed cloud. Be sure to check this page throughout the day for updates.

Key Announcements

• Gartner Says Infrastructure & Operations Leaders Must Shift Their Focus from Efficiency to Adaptive Resilience to Exploit New Opportunities

Gartner Opening Keynote: Adaptive Resilience to Empower the Anywhere Business

Presented by Dennis Smith, Douglas Toombs and Julia Palmer, VP Analysts, Gartner

The Covid-19 pandemic showed that infrastructure & operations (I&O) professionals can satisfy fast-changing business needs, but the future will be even more dynamic as businesses move quickly to exploit new opportunities. In the Opening Keynote, Dennis Smith, Douglas Toombs and Julia Palmer, VP Analysts at Gartner, explained how to transform I&O into an adaptive and resilient organization that can empower the anywhere business.

Key Takeaways

• "Your mission in I&O can be summarized in three goals: 1) work hard to retain talent and staff; 2) seek out new talent where you may find it and 3) support and nurture talent beyond an environment where they can grow and evolve."

• "Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is fundamental to an adaptive organization."

• "Organizations in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 36% more likely to have financial returns above their industry medians."

• "Talent availability is the most significant adoption barrier to 64% of emerging technologies."

• "Building seamless integration can be a struggle. I&O leaders must be building towards having APIs everywhere. Any system that stores or processes data for your organization has a comprehensive, robust and well-documented API."

• "As an I&O leader you must be aggressive in making automation a first class-discipline in everything that you do."

• "I&O must evolve to adaptive operations. Adaptive operations bring together your talent and your platforms in multiple new ways, to support constant business change."

• "I&O leaders will have to learn to work towards adaptive operations, to focus on multiple business models, by automating everything to create efficiency while prioritizing elasticity."

  Learn more from the Gartner Opening Keynote in the associatedGartner press release.

Watch this space for more updates throughout the day.