Just like the businesses they support, modern technologies are more distributed than ever before. No longer confined to a single, centralized data center, infrastructure and applications are in branch offices, retail outlets, and remote work sites. They're spread across private and public cloud environments. And they're fueling countless edge and IoT capabilities.

What's good for business can be difficult for IT, of course. Managing, supporting, and scaling these distributed systems and workloads can be extremely challenging. Especially when they're in far-flung locations with limited or no technical skills onsite.

For these reasons and more, "anywhere operations" is one of Gartner's top strategic technology trends for 2021. It represents "an IT operating model designed to support customers, enable employees, and manage the deployment of business services everywhere across distributed infrastructures. By the end of 2023, 40% of organizations will have applied anywhere operations to deliver optimized and blended virtual and physical customer and employee experiences."¹

Fortunately, there are solutions that help simplify IT delivery and management at the edge.

Australia-based Resolute Mining, for example, is using a combination of Cisco HyperFlex Edge and Cisco Intersight to support its remote mining operations in Mali. With hyperconverged infrastructure and cloud-based management, problems that used to require onsite intervention and often resulted in days of downtime are now easily resolved in minutes from Perth.

"Cisco HyperFlex is completely hands-off and totally self-sufficient," said Simon Duncalf, IT Manager at Resolute Mining. "It logs its own tickets, connects us with tech support, and heals itself until a permanent fix can be implemented."

These are all critical capabilities delivered with Cisco HyperFlex Edge and Cisco Intersight that can truly help customers as they strive towards "anywhere operations" and help in the continued pursuit of operational efficiency.

Learn more about Resolute Mining's edge infrastructure

Additional resources

Cloud and compute customer stories

Cisco data center and hybrid cloud solutions

¹Gartner: Top strategic technology trends for 2021