IT Professionals Find Optimism Amidst COVID-19 Pandemic

INAP’s Senior Vice President, Product & Technology, Jennifer Curry, appeared as a guest on a recent episode of TechStrong TV, a web series produced by the editors of Devops.com and Digital Anarchist. Curry discusses INAP’s latest research about the pandemic’s impact on IT infrastructure strategies, the prominence of security solutions in 2021 and the importance of visibility in managed services.

Check out Curry’s segment with Charlene O’Hanlon of MediaOps below:

Curry spoke on findings from INAP’s third-annual State of IT Infrastructure Management report, noting that IT professionals now feel their colleagues view them as essential due to the pandemic. In the previous year’s survey, IT pros reported feeling bogged down by mundane tasks and lacked the time to champion innovations for their organizations.

“The feeling among IT staff is optimistic about their place inside the company,” Curry said. “[Infrastructure demand] was unprecedented and it afforded a lot of optimism and creativity—opportunity for folks to showcase a different side of IT and where we fit.”

Even as the world returns to some sense of “normal,” IT will continue to find optimism in the call for innovation. There will be less of a focus on scale as sights shift to how infrastructure is pulled together and how people will interact with it moving forward. Curry noted that there will especially be an emphasis for security solutions to protect hybrid infrastructures.

“Security is a layered approach,” said Curry. “It’s not one and done. It’s not one solution. It’s layers against those different components of the infrastructure.”

Network, data and OS security figured prominently as an area that companies need help managing, with 35 percent of survey respondents noting this as a vital quality of infrastructure solutions since the beginning of the pandemic. Service providers can help build layers of security to ensure infrastructure solutions are safe and compliant.

Curry noted that cybersecurity strategies will become more and more complex as a company’s attack surface grows and data collected at the edge goes back to the core. Providers will bring their expertise from working with so many different clients and environments to figure out the best methods to protect and secure that data and infrastructure.

“One of the really critical items for CTOs, IT directors and application managers will be the visibility into everything going on that they’re not controlling,” Curry said. “You want to know. You want to be confident and want to see what your partners are doing.”

In November of 2020, INAP furthered its efforts to achieve unprecedented managed cloud visibility with the latest release of its Intelligent Monitoring service, which is now available for Bare Metal and Dedicated Private Cloud customers.