Gartner offered a list of 10 key trends in infrastructure that will affect IT and data centers over the next several years. While some of those trends might seem a little far-fetched, there are several that catch the eye.

Here are some of the top trends Gartner sees in the coming years, and a little bit about what we can expect going forward:

• Increasing tablet use by businesses. While desktops aren’t likely to go away anytime soon, tablets are being used by businesses increasingly for more specific applications. Add in the bring-your-own-device model, and this presents some interesting challenges in infrastructure, not the least is the challenges presented by compliance and data security.
• Mobility. Again, while desktops aren’t going to disappear, they’re becoming less and less relevant. As employees carry more and more devices with them, the BYOD model becomes more and more prevalent. The personal cloud, for many users, is a self-service situation, taking IT and the data center out of the infrastructure arena altogether.
• Fabric based data centers. Data center servers, networks, and storage are all becoming more flexible. As we uncouple applications from servers, there is less and less reason to be server centric. The way we manage infrastructure will have more to do with allocating resources across the data center – not just servers.
• Increasingly complex management concerns. Today’s IT and data center managers need to be able to look at the organization from the highest level. They need to be able to understand potential cascade effects from one change, and understand how infrastructure informs and is informed by technological changes.
• Data storage. Unstructured data will continue to be a challenge. Fortunately, there are more and more tools that let businesses apply analytical intelligence to that data, and make good choices about infrastructure concerns at a storage level.