Technology convergence. What does this mean for future IT management structures?

Information technology continues to develop at an astonishing rate. As part of this development, more often we are seeing a convergence of networks, server and storage technologies into unified solutions built on a common technology stack. This is becoming especially noticeable where organisations are looking to build “private cloud” style infrastructure to deliver a shared technology service into the business. There are a number of solutions on the market which integrate server, virtualisation and networking technology at the hardware level. Additionally, much of the enabling network infrastructure technologies (i.e. routing, switching and firewalls) are shifting from physical devices into these virtualised environments – something which will become more prevalent in the near future as the technology develops further.

As organisations begin to make use of this new technology convergence, it is becoming necessary to change the way operational support and delivery teams are structured. Networks, Server and Storage teams are now working together in a combined team managing the highly inter-twined technology.

This technology convergence at an operational level will begin to flow up into management teams, potentially resulting in the traditional IT towers of Networks, Storage and Compute being merged into a unified infrastructure organisation providing services to the business in a more dynamic and commoditised way.