Let me know if this sounds familiar. Your organization started with a data center, an actual building. Then you added a few satellite installations, either as server racks, co-lo, or additional physical data centers. Then management did a reorg and, all of a sudden, your IT team went from producing applications over the course of months or years to being expected to produce them in weeks.

So you turned to cloud services. Now you have hundreds of accounts and logins, much of your data is in SaaS applications run by competing companies, and even single sign-on seems aspirational. Billing, provisioning, backups, and security are scattered among dozens of unrelated stakeholders.

Also: Digital transformation powered by edge-to-cloud comes to life in this scenario of a big-box retailer

When something goes wrong (and it often does), finding out which system is at fault takes forever. Half the time, it's not just one system. Instead, it's the fact that your various infrastructure components don't play nice with each other. Now, you not only have bickering cloud services and bickering vendors, you also have mobile apps and confidential data that's not just in a couple of secure data centers, but on the phones and laptops of most of your managers.

Worse, have you noticed that the world is changing at warp speed? According to the Q1 2022 Quarterly Remote Work Report by careers platform Ladders, nearly a quarter of all professional jobs are now permanently remote. Data, employee equipment, and the problems that come with them are scattered pretty much everywhere.

Marketing, operations and HR are all begging for new, custom applications to help them keep up. But it's hard enough just to keep the existing systems from melting down. How are you and your fellow IT team members supposed to find the time to implement new solutions, too?

Digital transformation and cloud operations

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It's all very overwhelming. Fortunately, yours isn't the only organization that has been facing these challenges. The cloud revolution and the push for digital transformation have resulted in new ways of doing IT that make it possible to manage IT infrastructure as a coherent whole, while making it practical, approachable, and even smooth to spin up new infrastructure and new solutions to meet various business needs.

Much of this relates to the boom in cloud computing. But we're not just talking about software-as-a-service apps or even on-demand infrastructure that lives in some remote data center operated by one of the big tech companies. Sure, that's how it got started. But over time, something very important took place.

Companies started to see the benefits of cloud computing, and wanted to apply them to all levels of infrastructure