Challenges, trends and goals for 2022

In a current situation where, social relationships are being altered due to the need to reduce direct contact between people as much as possible, this year the majority trend will clearly be linked to the implementation and evolution of collaborative and teleworking environments.

From ​​Izertis, we believe that the main challenges that we face for this new technological course are:

Hybrid work: companies are being forced to bet on the combined modalities of face-to-face / remote work and are striving to implement the necessary systems to maintain productivity in these scenarios. Due to these bets, integrators must help companies to establish collaboration mechanisms and platforms to be able to create "connected experiences".

Concept or philosophy is strengthened in which all investment made in IT in companies has to start from a premise, security

Security by defect: this concept or philosophy is strengthened in which all investment made in IT in companies has to start from a premise, security. There should be no design, architecture or development where the point of origin is not security and hence the need to implement tested solutions to withstand all kinds of contingencies at the level of disasters, attacks and self-correction of vulnerabilities.

Hybrid ecosystems: the trend seen in recent years is consolidated, where there is no longer a commitment to an absolute migration to the cloud given the need for many companies to be "close to the data". This model, in which the cloud is used as an extension of the Datacenter, prevails in the technological scenarios of medium and large companies.

Additionally, in large companies are seeing a clear trend to analyse the different public or private cloud options to hire the most appropriate service model based on their needs, with tools for the centralized administration of their clouds and, thus providing cost savings to the business case.

Thanks to the evolution of the large Cloud operators, they are making APIs available to third parties for integration with large manufacturers that are facilitating the rapid development of this structure. Turning many classic IT scenarios into a nearly complete IT as a Service (ITaaS) model.

Automations: thanks to the facilitation of the IT automation process, we are beginning to ensure that concepts such as: continuous improvement and process optimization, help companies to achieve highly demanded objectives such as cost savings and time reduction.

The advances that we can offer in terms of consultancy thanks to the various existing tools for this purpose and a highly refined DevOps philosophy are achieving great advances and successes in this area within any IT sector.

Workplace: all the previous points, added to the introduction of this article, fall in turn on a concept that until a few years ago did not have the importance it deserved. The Workplace will continue to be one of the great challenges of these coming times since, although a large number of companies have adopted it to a greater or lesser extent, it is clear that this job (whether for their own staff or for third-party providers) must evolve, implementing security measures according to the service that this model is providing in a company.

At the same time, we must evaluate everything that the Workplace entails. Not only the use given to this type of solutions, but also the evaluation of the productivity obtained with this new paradigm shift in the way we work and connect to our workstation, our applications and business.

For all these previous challenges that, it is clear, we will have on the table by companies over the coming months, at Izertis we believe that we must help achieve it by establishing clear objectives based on four fundamental pillars:

Consultancy

The current technological scenario and the needs of companies can rarely be solved with the acquisition of a specific product, or with the incorporation of a certain profile to a vacancy position.

Nowadays, the need for a group of professionals who, through their experience and knowledge of the technological world, know how to advise, guide and accompany clients technologically, is key when faced with a specific problem of an IT manager.

The main objectives to be covered by this consultancy will be linked to:

• Independence of the infrastructure. It is imperative that all new development is generated with the obligation to be regardless of its place of execution. Systems must be allowed to evolve to run at any location and give companies the possibility to transform their IT into a PaaS & SaaS solution allowing horizontal scaling.
• Design without failure. Concepts such as: thinking about the point of failure in the initial phases, resilience and recovery strategies, establishing multiple zones or regions, among others, should be the priority in any meeting and conversation with companies before receiving your needs.
• Cost savings. We must be able to evolve our clients' scenarios by proposing improvements in the processes already in place to reduce time and, therefore, improve the business case. Through systems such as autoscaling, dedication of clouds for development and testing environments, implementation of reports on the use of services, we will be able to advance in this aspect.

Cloud

In this fundamental pillar of the IT world today, the main objectives that we must help achieve are:

• Multicloud. We must carry out an analysis of the services offered by the main providers (Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud) so that, added to the existing orchestration tools, and the "Cloud Analytics" that we have, we can build evolved cloud environments by grouping the best services regarding the quality/price from each of the providers.
• New business and service. There are many services and use cases that, thanks to the evolution of the cloud as a technology, we can begin to include within this possible technological revolution. Mainly measures related to security and compliance allow the transfer of businesses and services traditionally On Premise, their evolution to a cloud environment.

From another point of view, no less important, the cloud is helping many companies to meet their environmental commitments and even acquire ISO 14001, which responds to the need to reduce the CO2 footprint that we emit annually. By helping our clients to prepare these possible Business Cases, we will establish a great starting point for the success of the transformation.

Workplace

As we have mentioned in the previous points, a summary of all the existing objectives in the main technological areas is a common objective for any Workplace scenario today.

Concepts such as the hybrid work model, where the Employee Experience must be one of the main concerns. Promoting collaborative environments, corporate social networks and cost reduction through DaaS or SaaS solutions will be established as major objectives in all conversations.

Achieving an increase in productivity, AI models are being imposed on the market for job management and administration

Achieving an increase in productivity, AI models are being imposed on the market for job management and administration. Performance and activity monitoring will also be able to improve workflows that will help us improve the performance of the worker or supplier.

In addition, and as we find Cloud scenarios, thanks to the evolution of teleworking solutions, thanks to the entry of new peripherals compatible with this model and augmented reality technologies, it will allow us to increase the scope of scenarios that we can cover. In turn, the offer of unified communications solutions integrated in the Workplace has allowed the range of cases that can be covered to grow exponentially. Or, allow that through an investment in digitalization of processes and services they can be hosted within any more conventional Workplace environment.

Infrastructure

Any technological evolution, whether in the On Premise model or in any other model, must necessarily be accompanied by an evolution of the infrastructure on which all systems and IT in general are supported.

The main objectives with which we will help to meet the challenges and demands that we have discussed will be based on:

• Modernization of the Datacenter through the implementation of hyperconverged infrastructures, transformation of the concept of "hardware administration" to a centralized administration defined by software. With cloud overflow solutions, services such as backup, disaster recovery, supplier communications management, endpoint and perimeter security can be delegated on a pay-per-use basis and established in the cloud.
• Another of the great evolved concepts are all those linked to networking where, through related and evolved technologies thanks to 5G, possibilities to improve and establish robustness mechanisms in communications through SD-WAN, Service Mesh and Edge Networking, have made it possible that all the evolution discussed in these lines and that they are the future of technology become a reality.

We truly believe that all these trends, objectives and challenges presented here will create the bases for the technological modernization that lies ahead and that in the coming years, thanks in part to the promotion of investment given by actions such as the Next Generation EU Funds and all State aid and subsidies that will be developed derived from these, will establish the new index of technological solutions of the next projects most demanded by companies at a national and international level.