Hybrid IT Versus Disaster Recovery (DR) Confidence, automation strategy rethink and scaling DevOps agility – these are among the top trends that Gartner believes will impact digital infrastructure in 2020.

According to Gartner, most organisations are automating to some level, in many cases attempting to refocus staff on higher-value tasks. However, automation investments are often made without an overall automation strategy in mind.

Ross Winser, senior research director at Gartner, said, "As vendors continue to pop up and offer new automation options, companies risk ending up with a duplication of tools, processes and hidden costs that culminate to form a situation where they simply cannot scale infrastructure in the way the business expects. We think that by 2025, top performing leaders will have employed a dedicated role to steward automation forward and invest to build a proper automation strategy to get away from these ad hoc automation issues."

Winser added, "Today's infrastructure is in many places - colocation, on-premises data centres, edge locations, and in cloud services. The reality of this situation is that hybrid IT will seriously disrupt your incumbent disaster recover (DR) planning if it hasn't already."

According to Gartner, often organisations rely heavily on 'as a service (aaS)' offerings, where it is easy to overlook the optional features necessary to establish the correct levels of resilience. For instance, by 2021, the root cause of 90% of cloud-based availability issues will be the failure to fully use cloud service provider native redundancy capabilities.

"Organisations are left potentially exposed when their heritage DR plans designed for traditional systems have not been reviewed with new hybrid infrastructures in mind. Resilience requirements must be evaluated at design stages rather than treated as an afterthought two years after deployment," said Winser.

Gartner added that for organisations trying to scale DevOps, action is needed in 2020 to find an efficient approach for success. Although individual product teams typically master DevOps practices, constraints begin to emerge as organisations attempt to scale the number of DevOps teams.

"The vast majority of organisations that do not adopt a shared self-service platform approach will find that their DevOps initiatives simply do not scale," said Winser.

"Adopting a shared platform approach enables product teams to draw from an I&O digital toolbox of possibilities, while benefiting from high standards of governance and efficiency needed for scale."

The global research and analysis firm lists several other trends including: Infrastructure is everywhere – so is your data; the overwhelming impact of IOT; distributed cloud; immersive experience; democratisation of IT; networking - what's next?; and Hybrid Digital Infrastructure Management (HDIM).

Winser has encouraged I&O leaders to take a step back from "the pressure of keeping the lights on" and prepare for 10 key technologies and trends likely to significantly impact their support of digital infrastructure in 2020 and beyond.