As industries become more digitally-defined, IT demands exceed capabilities of aging organisations to the extent that they cannot meet requirements of consumers. It is here that a dynamic IT infrastructure becomes a sine qua non to accelerate business innovation
Disruption is the name of the new game in the business world which has been affecting industries — from retail to finance to manufacturing. With the rise of the digital economy, a direct link has been established between the effective use of data and positive business outcomes. Nimble and fast-moving companies as well as large organisations have indulged themselves in innovation by changing their business models. This has impacted many companies with traditional enterprise data centres and slow-changing business models.
Hence, in today’s digital economy, faster IT equates to a competitive advantage. Digitally-defined companies have a huge IT advantage and are capitalising on it with faster, more agile IT service delivery. Younger and more modernised companies prioritise outcomes focused on growth and innovation. They can adapt their environment to make good use of new technologies.
However, if companies do not finalise their IT strategy/investments well in advance, it leads to roadblocks, like creating complexity in the data centre, increased costs, et al. This leading to inefficient operations and low business innovation. Also, this is ideally important for businesses because of emergent and transformational workloads, which enable the opportunity to extract more value from data, thereby, creating the new requirements for IT. To grow and create new offerings, organisations need flexible IT systems that support greater business agility.
Therefore, in order to attain business stability, achieving IT stability is paramount. In other words, IT priorities must align more closely with business priorities. Modernised IT will provide stability and reliability for a wide range of workloads (both traditional and emerging). It will also ensure application, data security and help them avoid costly downtime.
Data centres based on the principle of IT flexibility will allow businesses to adapt to the changing business conditions and derive better innovative results. This will also help them to quickly match hardware resources with business needs. The above mentioned approach will give their systems the ability to scale up as demands increase, enabling the business to become more agile.
Thus, the catalyst to drive business innovation is building a unified and manageable IT infrastructure. This dynamic infrastructure will allow the organisations to:
i) Break down silos to speed up the pace of change: IT silos found in many data centres must be replaced by a more flexible infrastructure that has the capacity to supply, compute and store resources as needed. Combining compute and storage resources within a single system chassis brings valuable IT resources closer to the applications one needs to run a business. This approach provides a unified infrastructure inclusive of compute, storage and networking.
ii) Pool resources to fulfil business demands: Customers who want to transform their business can achieve more efficient, pressing IT objectives by tapping flexible systems on demand. They want faster compute, storage and networking resources for their systems, resulting in greater efficiency and scalability for growing workloads.
iii) Make management of the infrastructure simpler and easier: Many customers use dozens of software tools to monitor and manage data centre operations. They should be able to view all systems under management through a single pane of glass, and to leverage automation to control systems resources. This automation and built-in management allows administrators to manage compute, store and network.
Customers expect that they should be able to use their new systems for many years. That’s why systems that scale to meet business demands must support a useful lifetime of many years of updates for processors and on-board storage resources. This multi-generational approach to system life cycles helps organisations to protect and extend their infrastructure investments.
Ultimately, modular compute is a powerful and incredibly beneficial technology that plays a critical role in both IT transformation and in enabling success of modernised IT organisations. It delivers benefits in speed, agility, simplification, reliability, and cost not only at a high rate, but the average impact of each benefit is also substantial.
As industries become more digitally-defined, IT demands quickly exceed the capabilities of aging organisations, often to the extent that they cannot meet requirements of their consumers. Worse, they do not even know whether they are meeting them at all. Building a modernised IT organisation is not only beneficial, but has become a necessity. And the rewards for agile and speedy delivery of IT are substantial. Businesses with modernised IT are more innovative, capture more market opportunities, achieve higher revenue, improve customer satisfaction and are simply more competitive.
For aging IT organisations, transformation is a must. There are multiple steps to the IT transformation journey: The adoption of emerging and transformational workloads, increase of automation and the use of modern technologies. From the compute side, modular server technology has an answer: It allows organisations to deliver substantial benefits to speed, agility, cost and reliability.
Modularity offers the benefits modernised IT organisations require, thus enabling both the IT firm and the larger business to succeed. In an era where business competitiveness is defined by digital capabilities, the IT organisation becomes a differentiator. Giving your IT organisation the best tools to succeed, such as modular servers, may be the difference between thriving in this digital economy and just being a part of the status quo.
(The writer is Senior Director & General Manager — Infrastructure Solutions Group, Dell EMC India)
