Can your IT infrastructure provide variability and business continuity even in the face of a crisis like COVID-19?
The data centre, as we have known it for decades, with its servers, networks, storage, security appliances, racks, cables and power supply, is vanishing. The traditional on-premise data centre is becoming the stronghold of legacy systems and services that cannot be supported elsewhere. As organisations go digital, everything from applications to Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery are being virtualisation at the hands of a mature breed of IaaS and PaaS services on the cloud.
The advantage of moving workloads from a traditional data centre to the cloud goes beyond making infrastructure invisible (and getting rid of the headache of maintenance):
- Cloud-based IaaS and PaaS provide services on-demand and can scale based on workloads
- They are easy to integrate into existing enterprise IT
- They ensure infrastructure optimisation and continuity
- They provide access to the latest technology. Above all, they bring easy and painless cost control
We have followed the evolution of data centre technology for over two decades, and the signs are clear: Organisations are not investing in expensive hardware that is difficult to maintain, requires specialised skills, and cannot be retired easily when technology changes. At this point, you can ask yourself: Is your IT infrastructure ready to leverage new technologies like SDx, Containers, Artificial Intelligence, Block-chain and the Internet of Things? Is it able to integrate with voice-based assistants for the ultimate user experience? Can it use automation to improve provisioning, monitoring, optimisation and reporting? Can it provide variability and business continuity even in the face of a crisis like COVID-19? If the answer to the four questions is “No”, your organisation is a candidate for cloud and virtualisation.
We believe that more than 50% of large organisations will have moved their data centres to the cloud in the next two years. But medium-sized organisations have an even greater incentive to do so. Reason: They can have access to the same—or better—infrastructure than their larger competitors without upfront investments in assets.
This logic is supported by a survey we conducted recently across a broad range of industries. We asked respondents in our survey, which were the top investment areas in IT in the next 3 years. 79% said that the single-largest expense account would be the data centre cloud (IaaS and PaaS). 46% of respondents also said they have distributed their workloads across two or more public cloud partners.
Another important question is, should organisations consider a cloud-first or cloud-smart approach or have a multi-cloud strategy?
What organisations are doing to ensure IT infrastructure provides business value. How automation, analytics, AIOps, micro-services, open-source, IoT, edge computing, collaboration, work from home, etc., are reshaping the world of IT infrastructure. The report is a must-read if your organisation is ready to forge ahead and make IT infrastructure a partner in business success rather than a provider of functional services.
