Digital infrastructure has become a central plank of business operations. As the key plumbing of your digital business, it provides secure connectivity to the cloud, data centers, offices and customers. It has also become a hive of innovation over the last decade with a proliferation of vendors, technologies and services, enabling new applications and ways of working.
But with this choice has come ever-increasing complexity. IT departments in global enterprises now face several digital infrastructure challenges including:
- Dealing with multiple vendors and technologies to deliver services to the business
- Coping with the impact of shadow IT and cloud sprawl
- Supporting the rise of Generative AI, which is changing many traffic patterns in the enterprise
And it’s not just new applications that are impacting installed digital infrastructure. Businesses are suffering from an unstable market environment, with multiple geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainties requiring agility in business strategies. These include scaling presence in countries up or down, and the need for flexibility in supply chain strategies as tariffs impact world trade flows.
And your digital infrastructure needs to be agile enough to support these changing business needs and ensure reliance across all potential outcomes. In fact, according to IDC, “34% of organizations are reassessing their technology infrastructure with a view to achieving greater resilience.”
Increased flexibility needed for dynamic business environment
The problem is that this increased technical complexity in digital infrastructure can make it hard to make rapid changes or support new technology initiatives. While some services support on-demand scaling, there are many that don’t, especially in the networking domain, where longer less flexible contracts are still common.
In fact, IDC says that only around half of the enterprises believe their networks were ready to support their new technology plans. The two main areas that they wanted to address were the flexibility, agility and scalability of their networks (40%) and resilience and reliability (34%).
It’s not just enterprise networks that need overhauling for increased agility. Other areas that need attention include digital integration, limited time and resources, cybersecurity challenges, infrastructure complexity, multi-cloud and multi-vendor environments. For example, recent figures suggest that the proportion of IT projects not being delivered on time has risen to 29% in 2025 from 26% in 2024.
Analyst Gartner warns only 48% of digital initiatives meet or exceed their business outcome targets. However, it says that CIOs that are part of the digital vanguard have a 71% success rate in their digital projects, because they provide “compelling, easy-to-use platforms.”
Platformization promises to increase digital infrastructure agility
Platformization is crucial in driving agility in digital infrastructure. The approach integrates multiple elements of digital infrastructure, including network, cloud integration, observability, to allow enterprises to compose the services that meet their needs and control them through APIs. Because the elements are pre-tested and integrated, enterprises also have the flexibility to rapidly change their services in days rather than months if required.
But making the move to platformization isn’t something that can be done with a flick of a switch. It’s not only technology challenges that enterprises face in moving to next-generation digital infrastructure, they will also need to revamp their organization, people and processes to get the most out of this approach.
Taking an incremental approach to minimize risk
Furthermore, given the importance of digital infrastructure to the business, and the wide scope of technologies and services that fall under it, moving to a next generation platform is something that should be done incrementally. In fact, it’s often best to initially deploy limited but focused services through platformization, while leaving others in place for the time being.
Typical projects include mergers and acquisitions, where platformization can help integrate and enhance digital infrastructure without impacting the rest of the organization.
For example, we worked with a healthcare company as part of a merger and acquisition project, where regulatory constraints were a priority. We used platformization to ensure compliance from day one and support the corporate security policy. The key was the ability to instantly spin up virtual cloud firewalls to mitigate many of the risks it faced.
Maturity holds key to charting your own way forward
Choosing which projects to deploy first will depend very much on your individual environment. No enterprise is the same and every path will vary based on technology maturity, organization and appetite for risk. It is vital to identify strengths, weaknesses and areas for improvement across the organization in all domains. This will help develop a structured approach to digital infrastructure modernization, initially focusing on quick wins with demonstratable ROI.
To help enterprises in this process, we have developed a maturity assessment calculator that looks at the maturity of the organization over the main pillars that relate to digital infrastructure, namely:
- Business
- Governance
- Platform
- Security
- People and operations
The assessment provides a structured approach to measure your capabilities and processes against best practices. It identifies strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement across each of these pillars. This includes recommendations and a roadmap for action, which helps guide decision-making and resource allocation.
Author
Mohit Mitra
Mohit currently leads the Digital Infrastructure Strategic Value Proposition for Orange Business in Europe, this encompasses all customer requirements in the 3Cs, Connectivity, Cloud and Cybersecurity. With extensive experience in strategizing and executing Digital Infrastructure Transformation journeys, Mohit is most recently focused on enabling customers in operationalizing AI with trust and resilience, going beyond the hype for tangible business outcomes.
