The traditional role of IT Infrastructure is being rapidly transformed by the global Digital Transformation of business. In the ultra-competitive global economy that presents unlimited convenience for disruption and demands constant innovation the demands placed on IT are changing far more immediately  that many expected.

The success of your business is now determined by a combination of user experience, more appealing business models and rapid time-to-value. In this changing business environment expectations placed on IT leaders present an opportunity that demands fundamental change in the role of IT.

We are seeing an unparalleled remodeling of IT estates to better support the faster introduction of ingenious new services and to drive disruptive business models.

Digital Infrastructure is defined by a focus on enabling business agility and powering user experiences that drive customer engagement and loyalty.

Business agility relates directly to your ability to rapidly respond to the changing needs of the business. Aspirations here need to be reframed with a realization that in the hyper-competitive world in which we all now operate Time is the most demanding factor. Infrastructure must now focus on the rapid formulation, build and deployment of new products and services.

The recent acceleration of take-up of cloud services typifies this change. Whilst cost saving is often touted as a key motivation for cloud migration, the reality for many new digital heads is that the levels of business agility required for rapid delivery of the new class of experience-focused services heavily favors a cloud-native approach.

The ability to rapidly enable such services is a key element in any Digital Infrastructure and this drives a prioritization driven by a desire to quickly orchestrate new offerings that leverage existent capabilities wherever possible. A strong preference for consumption of pre-built cloud-hosted SaaS services dominates decision making and comes before any creation of new in-house assets. Any new user-focused services being built on a preferred PaaS platform that offers rapid creation, provisioning and easier management whilst leveraging standardized platform capabilities.

Agility is also driving investment in infrastructure technology and processes that support the quick delivery of new capabilities. Continuous Delivery and DevOps are good examples of digital work processes that focus on speed to value yet demand a corresponding Digital Infrastructure which can provision, deploy and manage services at will. The business requirement for almost instantaneous response brings an inevitable movement towards Automation as a key theme within Digital Infrastructure.

Automation brings three key benefits in the realms of cost, reliability and speed. Whilst the former is taken for granted, the focus on speed and reliability is often overlooked. In the new Digital landscape which is dominated by customer experience these benefits now come to the fore.

An ability to both Orchestrate and Automate business services delivered using internal and third-party providers is set to become the core capability and a central function within Digital Infrastructure.

Perhaps the most dramatic side-effect of the digital transformation of business is the perception that what both business and IT leaders seek is the operation of an IT Utility.

Like any other traditional utility, in a digitally transformed business the IT Infrastructure exhibits the very same demand and consumption behavior. Instant on (and instant off) with no human intervention and rock-solid stability is the new normal.

Your Digital Infrastructure must also offer the business a consumer grade experience, with easy discovery and click-to-consume services. And just like any other utility these services ‘just work’, are elastic and instantly scale to meet demand with no complicated processes impaired by human cooperation.

Whilst your transformed Digital Infrastructure is more agile and better able to rapidly deliver the capabilities demanded by the business it is also useful to consider how this is driving new features within infrastructure. In particular, the focus on the user experience is changing the definition of infrastructure to include far richer, high value services such as user experience management; advanced predictive and cognitive analytics now also expose automated action, meaning and understanding to all solutions running in this new digital landscape.

Whilst digital infrastructure grows to include new capabilities, dominated by the end to end themes of automation and orchestration, we must not lose sight of the way these in turn drive new behavior in the way we specify, absorb and maintain infrastructure.

The business user demands that easy consumer-like experience, unlimited flexibility with instant delivery of value. So the final core attribute of your Digital Infrastructure is that it must truly be software-defined. Dependencies on compute, storage and networking services must be abstracted away and replaced by composed environments that can be assembled, reconfigured and broken apart ‘at will’ to offer a massively simplified estate that is totally embedded within and enables a far more agile business environment.