The total amount of data created and consumed globally is increasing rapidly. Industry reports forecast that global annual data volume will grow from 64.2 zettabytes (ZB) recorded in 2020 to 180 ZB by 2025.
In a bid to ensure the stability and integrity of the thousands of IT services, apps, and devices, the global IT industry faces serious challenges and infrastructural constraints. Ignas Anfalovas, head of infrastructure at IPXO, shared insights about the areas that pose the biggest concerns as well as the potential solutions.
Anfalovas highlighted the rise in prices of bare-metal infrastructure as one of the major challenges that the industry is currently facing.
“Due to rising prices and maintenance costs, IT companies are now forced to migrate to a single hyper-scale cloud provider,” he said. “By modifying the infrastructure to be compatible with high-availability systems like Kubernetes, management and scaling becomes much easier for individual companies.”
He went ahead to explain that while dependence on one hyperscale system poses a significant operational risk, it is far more efficient than infrastructure rationing.
Anfalovas also identified COVID-19 and the proposed IPv6 adoption acceleration as the main drivers of the sharp increase in demand for IT infrastructure for peak hours.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has now placed even more pressure on the already-stretched IT infrastructure,” Anfalovas said. “Reliance on tech platforms became more acute, with many industries and businesses going digital to serve their clientele amid worldwide lockdowns in 2020.”
Indeed, a survey conducted by IBM shows that 60% of companies accelerated their digital transformation programs. From online shopping to increased use of social media and streaming services, daily internet traffic rose sharply by up to 40% in the U.S. alone.
Speaking about how the industry has reacted to these changes, Anfalovas was quick to describe it as a natural progression toward optimal resource management.
“This is a wake-up call for IT companies around the world to intensify efforts to optimize their infrastructure as global Internet demands increase,” he said. “Instead of reserving private resources for peak hours, cost-effective systems like Kubernetes give us the ability to provision environments that include only the necessary packages for the application to run, and hyper-cale cloud providers allow us to scale the infrastructure on demand.”
Another area that has drawn the attention of Anfalovas is the security breaches that have been experienced due to the changing IT landscape. Post-pandemic research by Deloitte showed nearly a 100% increase in cyberattacks conducted with entirely new methods.
“IT infrastructure developers who are building a platform that can work across multiple hyperscale cloud providers should implement a security policy and invest in monitoring tools to help observe changes in the business logic and flow of the platform,” Anfalovas said.
He concluded by advising that if the global digital transformation is to be sustained within the current infrastructural constraints, resources need to be managed in different RIRs, and IPs have to be rotated. Likewise, ROA updates have to be made regularly. Consequently, businesses around the world have to optimize their IT infrastructure management.
