Agility at the heart of IT, Datacentre & Business

With emerging technologies like cloud computing, Big Data/analytics, mobile computing and social offering new revenue stream opportunities, the organisations that will embrace agile data center tech will emerge as the winners

In 2013, we saw the concept of Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC) take centre stage, a datacentre that delivers a level of services that is more aligned to the way businesses are run- swiftly changing, expanding or contracting, in line with business needs. But in order to reap the benefits of SDDC to succeed and remain competitive, businesses need to be agile. Agile enough to adapt to new trends, agile enough to be resilient against unexpected events which include natural disasters, advanced persistent threats, or even varying customer expectations. The idea of SDDC is at the heart of what an “agile” datacentre is expected to deliver; yet an organization’s transformation to an agile datacentre is much more than SDDC. The time has now arrived for businesses to expand and accelerate on the journey to build the datacentre of the future which can automatically drive the business forward.

Driving business agility

As per the IDC 2014 report, in the APAC region, a hybrid cloud is likely to be the architecture of choice for the foreseeable future as it leverages both on-premise and off-premise datacentres. This enables IT managers to simply compare the performance characteristics of an internal datacentre directly to those of an external cloud datacentre. For many internal IT organizations, performance achieved by public cloud datacentres is superior in most respects than those found internally. Therefore, it is imperative to improve the agility of their own environments, as they risk being marginalized and considered a cost centre instead of a contributor to the profitable running of the business.

The advent of Internet of Things has also opened up new lines of business and untapped revenue opportunities for organizations. Although, before tapping such opportunities, organizations need to revitalize their internal storage infrastructures to cope and better manage the large volume of data that could be highly valued. This will make datacentre a precedence and gradually organizations will look for ways to optimize their delivery of services to their end users via infrastructure that offers speed, flexibility and a truly pro-active approach to adaptability. To achieve this, CIOs and IT managers need to be more proactive by taking charge of the datacentre of the future, so that IT by itself can drive the business forward instead of simply reacting to the business demands.

Building an agile infrastructure There are multiple reasons why a cloud-architecture is so important in today’s environment. As we realize that in the public cloud environments, businesses are able to deploy new services in hours, applications in minutes, and databases within seconds, something that was previously unheard of in the IT industry, this kind of agility should also be able to be delivered within the private cloud architecture.

At the most basic level all of this functionality is the need for agile businesses to have an improved strategy around the critical information that the business needs to operate. The architecture and infrastructure should all be designed so that information assets are managed in a highly available and yet secure manner so that it is ready to be delivered as a service to business users. For organizations to transform the way they function and become more agile, IDC suggests a five-step model that will enable them to successfully create an agile technology environment – Consolidation, Virtualization, Automation, Orchestration and Federation. In order to achieve the transformation, organizations need to put in place a critical data management or business intelligence strategy. Business intelligence is an underlying trend that will ensure that systems are correctly monitored and that the right information is captured, analysed and then acted upon.

“For organizations to transform the way they function and become more agile, IDC suggests a five-step model that will enable them to successfully create an agile technology environment – Consolidation, Virtualization, Automation, Orchestration and Federation”

The agile data center approach For any business or a partner to work on the transformation to the agile datacentre or to even evolve to such an environment, the primary task is to understand the issues and challenges in depth in order to suggest solutions that can help organizations in their smooth transition.

• A business that is agile includes an agile IT organization, one that combines the benefits of IT Intelligence with the right combinations of the optimized cost centre and trusted cloud service frameworks, tailored perfectly for each business service

• Only with IT Intelligence can datacentres and their organizations be truly agile: smart enough to efficiently, quickly and cost-efficiently meet customer needs, even as business requirements change over time.

• The agile data centre the right resources to the right users, in the right way This is viable only if the infrastructure is rightly instrumented to capture resourceful data, and an agile environment is achieved at a point where all the three circles converge to deliver what is derived.

Challenges and the road ahead

The challenge that most organizations are facing is that the environments they are currently managing were designed in a pre-cloud era with little thought for how virtualisation, automation and the flexibility demanded by more agile business practices would be executed. IT was operating in a command and control function and in the eyes of many business users, were unable to bridge the gap between what the business needed and what the IT department could safely and securely offer. However, as per the recent IDC study within the APAC market, with increased mobility and identified need for datacentre security, CIOs and IT managers are emphasizing on the need to redesign, for more erratic network access patterns. Moreover, 29% of the respondents are already in the process of moving towards a hybrid agile datacentre environment in that they are already moving towards a private cloud environment.

Today, we witness a move across the market towards the concept of agile datacentre and there has never been a greater need to accelerate this journey. With the emerging technologies like cloud computing, Big Data/analytics, mobile computing and social offering new revenue stream opportunities, the organisations that will embrace the opportunities sooner and increase customer loyalty and satisfaction, will emerge as the winners in the near future for attaining the transformation to agile datacentre.

Most importantly, while incorporating or suggesting an infrastructure expansion strategy, it is essential to understand the different approaches to infrastructure build-out, be it from building a new datacentre, refreshing an existing datacentre, or even moving to more of a cloud computing environment. As there are many moving parts within a datacentre ecosystem, hardly are two datatcentres identical, yet they all have one common goal: the clear capture, storage and presentation of critical business information to the right end users in a secure and efficient manner. This is the very essence of what IT is about, and aligning with a vendor that has been built on a aligning with a vendor clear understanding of the importance of this information is quite probably a sound strategy to follow.