EC News DeskToday, IT leaders struggle to manage the complexity across their IT environments. This includes not only core datacenter infrastructure, but remote and branch offices, disaster recovery sites and more. This complexity makes it difficult for the business to pursue new markets, develop advanced products & services, and tackle strategic initiatives, such as digital transformation projects.
Much of the challenge stems from legacy infrastructure, constructed with discrete resource silos, such as storage, server, virtualisation, networking and security. This fragmented design makes it difficult and time consuming to provision new IT environments to run critical business applications. Additionally, these architectures have multiple points of failure, creating a fragile IT system that is susceptible to unplanned downtime.
Managing this IT complexity demands significant process overhead for executing even basic tasks, such as adding additional capacity or upgrading software – adding unwanted friction to IT operations and slowing the business. Legacy architectures also impose financial burdens, with large upfront capital purchases required even for small-scale deployments.
This undeniable complexity has a profound impact on already-stretched IT teams. It requires the tight coordination of multiple IT specialists to handle simple operations, and – most importantly – leaves little time for true innovation.
This keeps us spending a disproportionate amount of our time on tending to infrastructure. Although the infrastructure is the underlying foundation, business partners care only about the applications and services that run upon them and because the infrastructure is complex and keep us focused on the speeds and feeds, it is no wonder that according to a Nutanix survey, 57% of developers circumvent instead of collaborate with IT.
To align ourselves with the needs of the business, we need to provision resources, deploy applications and help them go to market faster. This requires us to focus on delivering services rooted upon SLAs that go across technology silos and optimises utilisation across a shared infrastructure. This is why public cloud is becoming increasingly popular.
The adoption of public cloud services has reset expectations of what enterprise IT must deliver. Internal IT consumers need infrastructure provisioned in minutes, not weeks or months. Otherwise, the business will circumvent IT teams in favor of public cloud services, creating shadow IT challenges.
Public cloud has changed how organisations pay for and consume IT services. Expensive, overprovisioned infrastructure is no longer tenable. The business expects pay-as-you-grow economics, where IT services are provided only when needed, and paid for only when used.
Solutions that are simple to deploy, manage and scale – with one-click operations for common workflows. Continuous innovation with new features and capabilities incorporated into production environments continuously, non-disruptively and with no maintenance windows. Failure to adapt to elevated expectations poses risks to the business, and makes IT teams less relevant.
To meet a diverse and expanding set of IT requirements, organisations are leveraging multiple cloud environments to power their workloads and manage valuable customer and business data.
100% software-defined architectures provide significantly more flexibility and agility than those based on specialised hardware devices, which quickly become obsolete and depreciate in value.
Application-centric datacenters provide IT infrastructure services that adapt and respond to the needs of the application. The datacenter serves the application, not vice versa.
