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It is well understood that the technology that underpins the data center is changing. In fact, it’s not just changing—it’s accelerating. And that acceleration and change ultimately drives changes in how leaders think about how they design, build, and operate their infrastructure.

The changing evaluation criteria for data center networking were a primary focal point of research conducted earlier this year by consulting firm PwC. After hearing from more than 250 IT professionals from companies across the globe, PwC confirmed what most of us probably already feel: the things that are most important to consider when building a data center have already shifted. IT leaders used to focus primarily on cost and performance, while today’s leaders are focused elsewhere. Specifically, security and automation are the new top design criteria.

Budget constraints

For at least the last decade, the most important bottleneck in IT was budget. As companies have become more digital and applications have become more critical to the business, it has become a struggle simply to keep up with the demands of the business.

When you have to constantly add new applications and new capacity and new users, the primary constraint quickly becomes the budget. How do you keep pace with the personnel requirements to support everything when the equipment and software to keep up consumes most of the budget?

This has meant that the biggest puzzle to solve for IT leaders is how to stretch every dollar. It’s not at all surprising that this would elevate TCO to the top of any purchase criteria list for data center. When you are just trying to make ends meet, the best you can do is operate within your constraints. This dynamic is even more pronounced in those enterprises where IT has been historically treated as a cost center whose primary objective is to meet service agreements within an allocated cost envelope.

Changing bottlenecks

But as we transitioned into the digital era, the demands on IT have changed. IT isn’t merely a services organization in companies that rely on technology to either develop or deliver goods and services. In these companies, IT has a seat at the strategic table.

Where strategy is involved, the primary measure of success is no longer a set of base SLAs and an ability to conform to a budget. Success is being able to help transform the company at the rate that the market demands. If IT cannot keep up, the failure goes beyond an organization—the fate of the entire company now rests, in part, with enterprise IT.

While a budget could create a bottleneck in pre-digital IT departments, in a post-digital world, the bottleneck quickly becomes IT itself. And with this change, it means that IT is now responsible for enabling corporate agility. New product offerings riding on top of IT’s infrastructure demand that IT move at the pace of the market rather than the pace of the organization. In this environment, you’re either fast or you’re dead.

Automation leading the charge

So how does IT make a company faster?

If technology is the tool, then IT has to be better at adopting the latest technology so that the rest of the business can benefit. If you’re late with your big data offering, you will find yourself behind. If you don’t have a loyalty program, you will lose customers. If you are lagging in expanding your eCommerce capabilities, you won’t be able to increase sales. All of these things demand that IT keep up with the technology world around them.

But how can IT keep up when more than two-thirds of time is spent simply keeping the lights on?

Enter automation. If operations teams can automate key workflows, they can speed up the time it takes to do things while lowering the maintenance burden on a team whose primary task needs to move beyond just making it work. So whether it’s managing dynamic workloads across a multicloud environment or simply bringing speed to former ITIL shops, we believe automation is going to play a central role in all enterprise data centers going forward.

More than products

For companies looking toward a more automated data center network, the most important thing to know is that such a journey requires more than networking technology investments. There is an entirely different set of automation tools, spanning everything from monitoring to provisioning. Many of these tools will leverage more open source software which means IT needs to develop experience in handling open source.

But beyond the tools, the real changes are process and people-oriented. Enterprise change management needs to adapt as enterprises move from ITIL to more agile processes. This will trigger a need to educate and retrain personnel so that they are proficient across heterogeneous environments overlaid with a diverse set of integrated tools and automated workflows.

Start with operations

Perhaps most profound among all of these changes is the idea that operations needs to evolve from a late-stage add-on to an early architectural consideration. If automation is a supporting pillar for the data center, then there is a real question about whether the physical network or the over-the-top automation is the most important piece to lock in.

If the future is about agility, enterprises will need to architect their operational environment, specifying requirements for the underlying devices. Instrumentation, real-time streaming, and programmatic interfaces become the building blocks around which everything else is designed.

PwC’s research doesn’t just reflect a changing IT imperative. It suggests that there must be a fundamental shift in how enterprises approach the data center in general.

 By Michael Bushong

Published with permission from forums.juniper.net/t5/Blogs/ct-p/blogs