Top 5 digital transformation trends of 2021 for enterprise DDI

In 2020, the question was how fast could IT partner with business leaders to deliver collaboration, workflow and analytics capabilities in the cloud. This trend will extend into 2021, but with a difference: IT leaders will shift from a reactive posture to proactive, strategic digital transformation initiatives.

We found this article from TechTarget’s SearchCIO blog fascinating.

Thinking about how these transformative forces affect the entire IT backbone of your company can be overwhelming. Just as DDI (DNS, DHCP, and IP address management) itself serves as the foundation for all network services, transforming it will serve as a blueprint for your IT environments as a whole.

So we thought we’d focus on how these trends are mirrored onto the scope of DDI.

1. Business models, culture reshaped with agile DDI operations

IT organizations reinvented how they worked as they adopted DevOps culture and practices.

DevOps has been the key trend for the past years and is considered today almost as standard a practice as the cloud was previously. However, implementing DevOps practices is still in its early stages, with many organizations struggling to transform processes and culture.

An agile-by-default DDI can not only help speed along the transformation for the rest of your company, but it also aids in freeing up resources — from experts on your team to infrastructure capacity — that facilitate that change. Conversely, static DDI can bottleneck your attempts at modernizing your network operations.

Establishing strong DevOps practices in your core network services paves the way for the rest of the network and IT to follow suit.

2. Low-code benefits and deliver customer and employee experiences through single-layer APIs

Low-code platforms will not only help more organizations modernize legacy applications and move more workloads to the cloud, but also enable them to do so with fewer software development, cloud architecture and DevOps resources, which continue to be hard to find.

Rapidly shifting technology and consumer trends create increased pressure on delivering faster service, both externally and internally. Go-to-market strategies are increasingly narrow in their timeframes.

While leveraging multiple platforms allows companies to be more agile, it also creates increased management overhead that could counter those benefits. Separating the control mechanisms from the technology means DDI can pool management resources and scale them with efficiency.

Shifting DDI to use just a single control layer eliminates the need for specialized resources, shortens delivery times, and enhances productivity.

3. Freedom of movement for network data in multi-cloud environments

The growing choice of deployment options and multi-cloud management tools is good news for enterprises looking to move and grow strategic workloads on the right clouds for the job.

Multi-cloud, just like heterogeneous network environments, is a double-edged sword. The wider range of resources also complicates management, even as cloud vendors open their platforms for interoperability.

Network managers are often lured to cloud platforms because of their resilience and scalability. Only after a generally time-consuming and expensive migration do they realize the limitations of their chosen cloud provider, but by that point, they relinquished too much control over their own data.

With a DDI solution that’s natively multi-cloud, your organization can take back control over its DDI data and transformation and stay independent of vendor policies.

4. Real-time data processing and event-driven architectures on the network edge

[…] businesses with split-second reductions in data latency create significant business advantages.

Over time, enterprise IT has moved from on-premise to corporate data centers to the cloud — and now to the edge. More and more organizations must deliver resources faster by provisioning from the edge instead of from the cloud.

Decentralized DDI, whether through distributed DNS or templated DHCP, helps to deliver resources faster. Virtualized appliances reduce costs and maintenance requirements while allowing customization required by local needs.

Organizations with multi-location or global ambitions benefit from a flexible DDI solution deployed not on but over the network.

5. MLOps with data-driven DDI

MLOps offers advanced organizations the opportunity to reduce deployment time and monitor ML models for model drift in production.

The importance of data-driven decisions cannot be overstated. As enterprise networks grow in complexity, the need for visibility across the entire infrastructure demands precise input into the decision-making processes.

Data-driven DDI enables organizations to make smart decisions faster. Automated, high-frequency reporting can be used to spot workload trends, fend off the danger of bottlenecked performance and security vulnerabilities, and increase the ROI for network components. It can also serve as the foundation for future upgrades that bring artificial intelligence into the organization.

As we move into an AI-powered future, the data we collect today will play an essential role in establishing historical perspective and fuel better, smarter algorithms.

Organizations in 2021 need improved customer experiences, operational efficiencies and advanced capabilities -- minus the extensive technical expertise and myriad implementation risks.

All these trends point to one way: streamlining IT by reducing dependence on cyclical procurement, centralized management, and obscured visibility. In short, IT (and DDI) is moving towards a model focused on sustainability.

We’re excited to welcome more and more organizations to the world of sustainable networks.