Looking back on a career in IT, I wanted to reflect on the 20-plus years I spent working in and running data centers for Fortune 500 companies in the New York and New Jersey area. This was an exciting time, leading both large and small teams through some of the most complex transformations in IT infrastructure. Tasks included designing a trading floor infrastructure for a major bank that was implemented globally, overseeing the merger of two banks with very different IT backbones, driving a mainframe-to-open systems modernization effort, managing a data center consolidation, and establishing global IT standards.
Today, the challenges to the job are even more profound than transitioning from mainframes to the internet, digital, mobile, and cloud world. With the advent of AI and explosive data growth from so many more devices and applications, IT infrastructure leaders must rewrite their stories to keep pace.
After moving to the vendor side several years ago and working as a senior solutions architect at Komprise, I get to work with IT leaders daily, and I see just how much the role of the infrastructure or data center director has changed. Here’s how I see the shift, with some tips for IT infrastructure directors and executives to stay relevant in their organizations while navigating these cataclysmic shifts in technology and work.
A Shift Toward Complexity and Constant Adaptation
The job of managing data centers and infrastructure has become more multifaceted. It is no longer just about uptime and physical infrastructure. Directors are now expected to understand a rapidly expanding universe of technologies. There is increased separation of duties and new responsibilities that did not exist 10 years ago. Add in constant security threats, cloud optimization demands, and the exponential growth of unstructured data that must be accessible where it’s needed, but in a safe, secure manner, and the scope of the role expands fast. While all of this happens, IT budgets are being squeezed. The mandate remains the same: Do more with less.
The Unstructured Data Growth Challenge
A resounding pressure point today is storage and the relentless growth of unstructured data. Recent estimates from IDC show that more than 80% of enterprise data is unstructured, and that volume is expected to reach 291 zettabytes by 2027. How do you back it all up in a timely way? How do you replicate it for disaster recovery? How do you ensure protection and accessibility? How do you efficiently prepare it for AI ingestion? It has come down to understanding that all data is not the same, and you must treat data differently so that you can be efficient in your management of the data. Knowing what data you have, where it lives, and what value it offers is now a core competency for any infrastructure leader.
Hybrid IT and Simplification as a Strategy
Over the past few years, I have seen storage and infrastructure strategies shift significantly. The old model of managing everything the same way is obsolete. My approach has always been to keep environments as simple and basic as possible to reduce unnecessary complexity. In today’s typical hybrid IT landscape, that means using tools that are vendor-agnostic; that work across on-prem, outsourced, and cloud environments; and that give you a single dashboard to make informed decisions.