IT Design Patterns Needed – Now More Than Ever

Over the past decade, successive waves of technology innovation have resulted in complex IT infrastructure that is problematic to manage and secure. Given the myriad of challenges and the extraordinary level of complexity that IT networking, cloud and security operations professionals are grappling with today, the need for new design patterns has never been more acute. Cutting through all this complexity and converging on innovative, trusted design patterns is no mean feat, but ONUG is uniquely positioned to help.

A design pattern is a vendor-agnostic, reusable solution to a common operations, engineering or architecture problem that can be used to build and operate efficient, reliable, and secure application infrastructure, while satisfying business and technical requirements for cost, performance, scalability, reliability, security, manageability, governance and compliance. Design patterns are expressed as specific approaches, methods or practices, grounded in fundamental principles, such as common reference architectures, design blueprints, automation templates for processes and workflows, service model definitions or canonical data models.

In the absence of well-understood design patterns, enterprises adopting emerging technologies typically collaborate with IT suppliers to develop solutions that are crafted for their own environment. This results in a collective process of trial and error, with multiple IT organizations tackling the same set of challenges but taking different approaches.

This Darwinian market dynamic can result in the adoption of unsound design patterns that saddle companies with technical debt, poor application performance and exposure to security threats. In the worst case, a wrong approach might require swapping out a deployed solution long before the investment is fully amortized.

The ONUG Collaborative – Uniquely Positioned to Help

The ONUG Collaborative provides a supplier-agnostic, unbiased forum for peer-to-peer engagement and a level playing field for collaboration between IT suppliers and IT professionals. A major tenet of this mission is helping networking, cloud and security operations teams overcome the challenges of adopting new technologies by employing successful design patterns for trusted infrastructure that lead to positive business outcomes.

Shared knowledge is power. Therefore, to help foster the early adoption of innovative design patterns, the ONUG Collaborative is launching a new program for identifying and promoting reusable approaches for overcoming common networking and security challenges that are based on successful deployments in fully-operational environments

Innovative Design Patterns for Trusted IT Infrastructure

The ONUG-Endorsed Design Pattern Innovation Program enables IT suppliers – product vendors, cloud service providers, communications service providers and system integrators – to leverage ONUG’s platform for validating and promoting the adoption of design pattern innovations that have been proven successful in fully-operational, large-scale enterprise deployments.

The program is open to all IT suppliers in the ONUG Collaborative. Participants submit a written proposal describing a design pattern, which will be evaluated and validated by a panel of senior enterprise IT professionals drawn from the ONUG Community. Suppliers are granted a license to use the ONUG-Endorsed Logo when promoting the adoption of their design pattern innovation for their product, service or solution.

ONUG will promote all design pattern innovations to the worldwide community of Global 2000 enterprise IT professionals via the ONUG website, newsletter, social media channels and conference sessions.

ONUG-Endorsed design patterns assure enterprise IT professionals that they are adopting field-proven, vendor-agnostic, reusable approaches to many of the common challenges encountered in today’s highly complex operational environments, so they can build and operate trusted IT infrastructure with confidence.

Get more information about the ONUG Collaborative Design Pattern Initiative here.