Many organizations were forced to transform how they did business over the past year. Continuing with that growth and making transformations permanent requires looking at problems with new eyes to envision new solutions.
One of the biggest ongoing challenges is the growth of data, which continues at a rapid pace. Not only is the data siloed and unshareable, it’s often unstructured and unmanaged. As employees work from home, data sometimes slips from the business’ control. The net effect is loss of insight, loss of efficiency, increased costs, and increased risks to security and data governance. Systems and operations teams are overloaded and achieving performance and availability requires significant manual effort.
Another major limitation comes from the limitations and complexity of tradition, legacy infrastructure. Although every deployment surely started with a rational design, over time, architectures often become ad hoc mixtures of technology. Supporting it is labor intensive and requires expertise across multiple products. And even though the architectures contain a mix of technology, that flexible choice of products doesn’t necessarily make the system flexible, agile, or scalable.
Transformation Requires Simplification
Transformation requires businesses to streamline and simplify, digging out from complex processes and unwieldy infrastructure to develop speedier responses. Achieving this requires:
Eliminating Silos
By removing data silos, businesses can reduce redundancy, increase data sharing, and develop new insights. By simplifying technical architectures, the knowledge needed to provide support becomes less scarce and fewer specializations are required.
Simplifying Management
Reducing complexity allows many operations and management processes to be automated, freeing employees to work on projects that add business value. In addition, with easier oversight and automated procedures, changes can be made more rapidly, allowing a business to react more flexibly to challenges.
Increasing Scalability
Responding flexibly to challenges is one of the major drivers of transformation, and that can only be achieved with a technical approach that’s simple enough to support rapid scalability. It’s important to note that scalability needs to be in both directions—scaling up when demand increases and scaling down when demand shrinks—in order to take advantage of new opportunities without sinking irrecoverable costs into short-term needs.
Technology for Transformation
There are two major technology choices that allow businesses to achieve the simplification that supports transformation: cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure. In fact, private and hybrid clouds are often implemented using hyperconverged infrastructure in the data center.
Whether to use cloud or hyperconverged infrastructure or both in order to support digital transformation depends largely on whether a business wants to shift more of its IT support to the cloud provider or whether it wants to retain greater control over its IT resources. Whichever model you choose, VAST IT Services has the expertise and experience to ensure the transformation succeeds. Contact us to learn how VAST IT Services can support your digital transformation.
