How The Cloud is Changing IT's Role

Great having the opportunity to meet with Raj Sabhlok, President of ManageEngine at their Chicago user conference and learn more his vision for the role of IT in the cloud era. 

ManageEngine has been providing IT operations and service management since 2001. Their offerings include Active Directory management, operations management, analytics, service management, endpoint management, and security. Zoho's operating system for business with more than 40 business apps to run entire businesses.

In the cloud era, IT's role is changing. There was a time when IT focused on integrating infrastructure. Today, the focus is on integrating cloud applications with connectors that use web interfaces (e.g., REST and other APIs) that cloud applications provide, identifying and choosing data integration tools.

IT organizations are also required to provide a seamless experience with respect to Identity Access Management (IAM). Active Directory 360 is IAM for managing user identity, governing access to resources, enforcing security, and ensuring compliance.

Cybersecurity can get overlooked when projects don’t involve IT. IT can help mitigate security and privacy risk by defining and applying security policies. IT needs to establish and enforce a consistent approach to security to protect the business. This includes secure authentication, access control, auditing/compliance, and endpoint management.

Cloud-native and SaaS have reduced responsibility for IT organizations. SaaS lowers upfront costs, enables quick set up and deployment, easy upgrades, accessibility, and scalability. Two-thirds of IT management requirement has gone away with SaaS. Rapid development in the cloud is eating at the SaaS moat. SaaS ate infrastructure, and the cloud will eat SaaS.

How is IT dealing with the change? Site-reliability engineers (SREs). To keep up with the increasing pace of operations, tools must integrate. The SRE landscape covers monitoring, logging, ticketing, and alerting. Legacy vendors and their point solutions won’t last in this next evolution of monitoring since IT will refuse to manage haphazard integration projects.

Systems of intelligence, AI/ML, are on the near-term horizon. These are highly-focused analytical systems designed to solve business challenges and achieve objectives. According to Forrester, by 2021, insights-driven business will steal $1.8 trillion per year in business revenue from competitors that are not insights driven. Zia (Zoho Intelligent Assistant) is Zoho’s conversational intelligent assistant providing:

• Natural language processing (NLP) enabled chatbots for ITSM
• AI coupled with pattern detection for endpoint management
• ML powered root-cause analysis and remediation for IT operations
• Contextual clues using AI for security information event management (SIEM)

Leading IT organizations will be defined by their expertise in addressing the critical requirements of the cloud, integration, and using AI/ML to run their operations more efficiently and effectively.