Enterprise IT has long been divided into silos. This is because of scarce resources and specialized knowledge required to perform some IT operations tasks. The world of today is much more focused on outcomes and the need for silos is waning. In this episode of the Tech Field Day Podcast, Stephen Foskett, Alastair Cooke, and Tom Hollingsworth discuss how enterprise IT has moved away from silos due to increased resource availability and cross training. They also look ahead to new challenges from advances like AI and quantum computing.
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Technology Silos Are a Thing of the Past
Enterprise IT has long been divided into silos. This is because of scarce resources and specialized knowledge required to perform some IT operations tasks. The world of today is much more focused on outcomes and the need for silos is waning. In this episode of the Tech Field Day Podcast, Stephen Foskett, Alastair Cooke, and Tom Hollingsworth discuss how enterprise IT has moved away from silos due to increased resource availability and cross training. They also look ahead to new challenges from advances like AI and quantum computing.
Silos were very popular in the days when you storage admins and your network engineers had their own spaces to operate and no one really did any cross training. You had your area and you stuck to it. As IT evolved those silo walls started coming down. Storage and compute merged because of virtualization. Wireless and traditional networking have started to become one edge-focused solution. All of those came even before the cloud started battering down the barriers to how we need to consider working with our infrastructure.
Part of the reason for the changes is abundance. We no longer have to conserve resources as we once did. Bandwidth is plentiful. Cloud computing makes CPU and storage effectively unlimited if budgets allow. Engineers no longer need to worry about the minutia of esoteric configurations that optimize dwindling resources. Instead, engineering and development talent have started to focus on outcomes. Applications have become the atomic unit of deployment, while networking and storage have been relegated to components of the overall solution.
That’s not to say that new challenges aren’t on the horizon for IT silos. AI is creating new boundaries based on resources that, while deep, are also very expensive to create and maintain. These new constraints are creating divisions just like the old silos. Another challenge is the need to simplify and abstract enterprise IT technology. Hiding the complexity from DevOps and AIOps teams doesn’t mean that it goes away. Instead it leads to bigger issues when the abstractions fail and the understanding of the siloed nature of IT isn’t there.
The future continues to be uncertain as the power needs of AI and the hardware requirements of quantum computing seem to be limitless. The unpredictability of the deployment of these technologies and the lack of efficiency they demonstrate today mean that we may have eliminated our existing silos only to have set up the creation of many more.
Podcast Information:
Tom Hollingsworth is the Networking Analyst for The Futurum Group and Event Lead for Tech Field Day. You can connect with Tom on LinkedIn and X/Twitter. Find out more on his blog or on the Tech Field Day website.
Stephen Foskett is the President of the Tech Field Day Business Unit and Organizer of the Tech Field Day Event Series, now part of The Futurum Group. Connect with Stephen on LinkedIn or on X/Twitter.
Alastair Cooke is a Tech Field Day Event Lead, now part of The Futurum Group. You can connect with Alastair on LinkedIn or on X/Twitter and you can read more of his research notes and insights on The Futurum Group’s website.
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Tech Field Day Podcast. If you enjoyed the discussion, please remember to subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcast application so you don’t miss an episode and do give us a rating and a review. This podcast was brought to you by Tech Field Day, home of IT experts from across the enterprise, now part of The Futurum Group.
