Strategic Leadership in Infrastructure Modernization

Adel Bekhiet, Senior Director of Infrastructure and Cloud Services, Northwestern Mutual

Adel Bekhiet, Senior Director of Infrastructure and Cloud Services, Northwestern Mutual

A seasoned infrastructure leader, Adel Bekhiet, grew into a senior leadership role by embracing challenges, monitoring teams and leading change. Passionate about innovation, he brings a rare blend of technical depth and strategic vision and help organizations modernize with a stable and secure infrastructure.

My journey from Principal Engineer and technologist to Senior Director was full of adventures, challenges and hard work. I gained valuable experience from dealing with complex technical issues and mentoring and coaching technical staff, to building high-performance teams, developing and defining long-term technology roadmaps and leading organizational change and adoption. I developed strong vendor and partners management skills with a great focus on stretching and expanding my knowledge and network from subject matter expertise and technical depth to strategic breadth, people leadership and organizational influence. Such multifaceted expertise enabled me to approach Infrastructure and Cloud transformation not just as a technical challenge, but as a holistic strategic imperative for the business.

Striking a balance between operational stability and introducing new technologies is by far one of the biggest and most complex challenges infrastructure leaders face nowadays. This is mainly due to the need to innovate for business growth and efficiency while ensuring stability with minimal impact on the day-to-day operations of the core business. To effectively deal with this challenge, one should have clear alignment and engagement with various stakeholders, have clear goals, focus on continuous assessment of their gaps and needs and transform them into meaningful, innovative and agile objectives. These objectives must prioritize security, risk management, availability and stability as top of mind while designing and building such solutions in a phased and iterative approach with a great deal of automation. This ensures stability by reducing human errors, addressing repetitive tasks and systematically driving continuous improvement.

Overcoming Roadblocks to Modernization

Today’s Enterprises and leaders face multi-faceted and complicated challenges when considering any infrastructure modernization. These challenges are far-reaching and impactful at all levels. It all starts with the organization’s wellness to change and adopt new processes and new ways of thinking and doing business as much as possible. Success depends on a well-structured methodology to deal with resistance, especially focusing on team members and leaders accustomed to traditional ways of working. This can derail and be a roadblock to any modernization initiatives.

“Striking a balance between operational stability and introducing new technologies is by far one of the biggest and most complex challenges infrastructure leaders face nowadays.”

Aging workforce and a shortage of key talent in modern technologies is another major challenge companies face. Organizations struggle to find individuals with the right skill sets to support their modernization journey. This can be addressed through a combination of things, including using managed service providers and partners and accelerating upskilling or reskilling to keep up with the fast pace of how technology is moving nowadays.

In addition, some critical key challenges should be front and center in any modernization efforts, specifically centered on cost management, governance, security posture and compliance. To deal with such challenges, one should have a solid cost management and monitoring system, along with clearly defined guardrails that can provide a great deal of control and governance over any cost incurred while assessing and implementing modernization solutions. On the security front, companies should always conduct regular, detailed audits while keeping security with a great focus on zero trust, cyber resiliency, strong identity and access management system.

Future of Enterprise Infrastructure

In general, as Edge computing, AI-driven automation and Hyper-converged systems mature, I see the future of enterprise infrastructure evolving significantly at all levels. Companies and organizations that heavily invest in and adopt such technological advancements will be in a much better position to implement innovative and modern technologies than others. This, in turn, will give them a competitive edge and potentially a larger market share.

To achieve such a goal and stay ahead of the game, companies need to primarily focus on key technologies like hyper-converged platforms managed with Infrastructure as code and AIOps. They can incorporate AI into provisioning, maintenance issues and problem management in a highly automated and proactive way to improve operational efficiency. Companies should also use AI-driven automation to build a zero-trust environment with cyber resiliency and intelligence to detect, protect and prevent cyberattacks.

Next Wave of Modernization

In my humble opinion, I truly believe companies should seriously invest more in edge computing, incorporating Hyper-Converged infrastructures as a key component of it and integrating it into their cloud platforms in a very seamless and cohesive way. This can enable them to adopt new, innovative solutions where workloads can fit the most, rather than based on personal preference, which can greatly help any modernization journey.

Succeeding in leading Infrastructure and Cloud Services at an enterprise level requires due diligence, a great mix of leadership qualities, excellent communication, selling, inspiring and influential skills, while having a balanced and advanced level of strategic business and technical acumen that allows them to balance between operational stability and adoption of modernization and innovative practices.