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In this knowledge brief, we’ll look at how successful organizations are speeding digital transformation by building IT infrastructures that give them the agility and innovation to meet the high demands of environments implemented through cloud, microservices, and enterprise data management.
No business can afford to sit still, especially in today’s environment. To overcome challenges, increase agility, and become more competitive, organizations must work to upgrade and modernize their infrastructure and boost capabilities.
Today, many organizations are focused on scaling all aspects of their IT operations. With improved and more automated infrastructures, leading businesses are transforming their use of technology, allowing them to deliver IT projects faster and become more innovative within the business.
But getting to this more agile IT infrastructure is a challenge for businesses that lack the right skillsets, have poor visibility into their IT availability and utilization, and are hamstrung by currency in their legacy systems and the investment needed to modernize them.
To become a leader, businesses need to embrace automated and innovative infrastructures that enable them to deliver projects faster and scale to meet the demands of modern organizations. By following the key practices of leading businesses, any organization can transform their IT infrastructure to boost agility, resiliency, and risk tolerance.
Becoming a Technology-driven Company
When one looks at how different organizations take advantage of new technologies, two distinct styles become apparent. There are businesses that simply buy technology, with no clear plan or understanding of how to effectively use it, and there are businesses that work to knowhow a technology will transform them, how it is best implemented and used to grow and improve the entire organization.
Clearly, the second group of businesses are the most successful when it comes to innovating and transforming through technology. But every organization faces a number of challenges when optimizing and scaling their infrastructure and data center.
When Aberdeen asked businesses about the top challenges they face in building an improved and automated IT infrastructure, nearly all of the leading hurdles revolved around scalability and demand, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Top Data Infrastructure Challenges
As demands rise for access to critical applications and resources, especially from remote workers and offices, organizations need to ensure the highest levels of performance for their data center infrastructure. Along with this demand comes the massive amounts of data that drive and inform businesses today—data which is stressing infrastructures of all sizes.
Businesses are also challenged to finance new infrastructures. In other words, these organizations need to find solutions and partners that enable transformation in the most cost effective and efficient way possible.
Taking a Strategic Approach to Data Center Modernization
One of the biggest hurdles that many businesses face is their own approach to modernizing and adopting new and improved technologies. Often, these organizations take a tactical, or single purpose, project-based approach, meaning they are focused on building an application, or implementing a technology.
However, successful businesses are much more strategic and see the forest from the trees, so to speak. These leaders are focused on the outcomes, the goal of doing something, of creating a product, as opposed to just, for example, building an application.
Among these approaches, businesses that effectively carry out digital transformation are also heavily focused on the infrastructure and vital data that is essential to these applications and new technologies. After all, a critical data set will often serve many applications, and can last for years longer than any one application.
When successful organizations are strategically focused on their goals, and implement strong infrastructure systems that serve as a solid foundation for their data, they greatly speed the time to accomplish tasks and projects, reduce costs and complexity, and become more agile and innovative. Moreover, they are better able to leverage other critical new technologies, such as hybrid cloud.
Aberdeen research has shown that over half of businesses today (52%) are using hybrid cloud. We’ve seen that when an organization has an agile and resilient infrastructure designed to work with hybrid systems, they better manage and utilize critical data to drive their transformation.
Leading businesses carry out these transformations by moving from an application or project focused IT approach, to a data-centric and product focused strategy. With this approach, they gain the agility and resiliency to keep their business competitive and innovative.
Reaping the Benefits of an Effective Data Center Modernization
Taking a data and product-centered approach to IT infrastructure modernization isn’t just about better innovation and agility. These changes effectuate tangible benefits that enhance an organization’s effectiveness and bottom-line.
When businesses get past the old way of implementing and managing IT projects, they achieve key benefits and advantages over less agile and innovative competitors. In Table 1 below, we see that these leading organizations exceed their peers in both innovation and in key IT benefits.
For example, with an effective, data-driven IT modernization in place, businesses are more likely to already be leveraging new technologies such as the Internet of Things and hybrid cloud, while their less agile peers are tied down by older processes and project-focused IT approaches.
Businesses that embrace data center modernization are:
Table 1: Key Benefits of Effective IT Infrastructure Transformation
From a bottom-line standpoint, with a product-focused modernization in place, businesses see lower IT costs than their competitors, and are over two times more likely to cut their overall data center expenses. And with newer and more resilient technologies in place for their IT infrastructure, these businesses also see improvements in security, meaning they are more confident in their ability to protect and leverage data.
Key Recommendations
Health experts will tell you that sitting still for too long is bad for your health; that you need to move to be fit and healthy. The same is true for the health of IT operations. If you’re IT infrastructure isn’t moving forward, transforming, and becoming more agile, it’s prognosis probably isn’t very good.
For businesses to effectively modernize, they need to improve their insight and knowledge about their IT needs, figure out where their business needs to move forward to innovate, and how to get past processes and practices that are holding them back. Leading organizations that have successfully modernized their IT infrastructure have not just innovated in technology, but in how they strategically go about their IT operations.
By rethinking how they implement IT products as opposed to projects, and by working with partners that have the same mindset, leading businesses transform their infrastructure quickly and without complexity. To join these leaders, consider these key recommendations for a successful digital transformation.
- Take a predictive and data-driven approach–When working towards a digital transformation, go beyond the near-term impact of projects today and work to understand how it will change your business in coming years. Understand the entire lifecycle of products, applications, infrastructure, and the data behind all of it.
- Transform and modernize your entire operation–Businesses that are successful at digital transformations are also working to carry out change within their entire organization. From executives to project leaders, everyone needs to be working towards key goals and milestones and not focused on hundreds of little projects. When the entire operation embraces change, many of the challenges to innovation and agility can be easily overcome.
- Work with partners who understand your business and modernization–Every sector and industry is impacted differently by new technologies and trends. Businesses that are leaders in digital transformation choose partners who understand their specific requirements, challenges, and opportunities, while also having deep expertise in key technologies of today, such as hybrid cloud. When you work with a partner who is a peer that knows your day-to-day, it makes a significant difference in effectively transforming your organization.
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Aberdeen Strategy & ResearchOpens a new window , a division of Spiceworks Ziff DavisOpens a new window , with over three decades of experience in independent, credible market research, helps illuminate market realities and inform business strategies. Our fact-based, unbiased, and outcome-centric research approach provides insights on technology, customer management, and business operations, to inspire critical thinking and ignite data-driven business actions.