Digital transformation (DX) is a journey that most organizations have to undertake in order to future-proof their existence. Organizations embark on DX initiatives to achieve business growth, gain competitive advantage, and deliver improved customer experiences. For many organizations, applications and workloads are at the center of their DX efforts, given that so much of their business is conducted and enhanced via applications.
For these organizations, cloud is a crucial foundation for their DX initiatives. A recent multi-client study conducted by IDC on IT infrastructure workloads shows that globally, from 2013 to 2020, the cumulative off-premises (i.e., in the cloud or in colocation data centers) server infrastructure volume deployed will account for 42% of the total installed base (with associated storage capacity accounting for 67% of the total installed base). In terms of IT spend on infrastructure, this translates to 37% and 41%, respectively.
Cloud shapes enterprise IT service strategies, and therefore, influences the outcome of DX initiatives. The shift to and the influence of cloud ushers in a new era of hybrid IT that addresses the needs of a
Organizations that fully embrace the distributed infrastructure model supported by hybrid IT don't treat the IT department as a back-office function. Instead, they see IT as a core competency โ one that drives new sources of competitive differentiation, while also supporting ongoing business processes. Yet, operating, managing, and quickly delivering IT resources across this hybrid environment can be complicated.
Deploying and managing hybrid IT has some common IT challenges โ not the least of which is the training operations and development personnel must undergo as IT itself shifts to a service broker model. In terms of technical issues, hybrid IT brings with it concerns around interoperability and integration, application certification, and concerns about newer technologies from line of business and IT executives. From a line of business and IT decision maker perspective, hybrid infrastructure leads to questions about adherence to SLAs; transparency and consistency across clouds; and application certification, performance, and cost.
With the right approach, IT should be able to efficiently modernize its application portfolio, while maintaining steady-state apps โ a critical aspect of supporting speed and agility, both on- and off-premises. To overcome both technical and business challenges, organizations need to take proactive steps to accelerate the management and delivery of services across their hybrid IT environment. First, IT needs to be able to manage resources across multiple cloud environments. This means having a unified "consumption-centric" view of all on- and off-premises IT resources that delivers visibility into the economic, health, performance, and utilization status of each tier. Next, IT needs to be able to provide flexible premises-agnostic composable compute and storage resource pools for current and next-gen apps, front-ended by a cloud-like portal for simple and metered (pay-per-use) consumption. Lastly, by deploying software-defined infrastructure (e.g., hyperconverged and composable infrastructure), IT can speed application delivery. Here itโs important to have a comprehensive and scalable โinfrastructure as codeโ API toolkit that enables application developers and IT operations staff to deploy methodologies like DevOps across the entire organization and thus, shift focus from infrastructure management to accelerating application delivery.
Digital transformation (DX) is disrupting every industry and, for most, hybrid IT is now a reality. To learn more about this topic, register now to attend a live webinar on April 26th at 12 pm EST. In this HPE-sponsored discussion, I will join Lauren Whitehouse from HPE to review actionable steps and new strategies organizations can adopt to reduce complexity and bring greater agility to their hybrid IT environment.
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Ashish
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