It has never been more difficult to be in IT. As a “recovering CIO” myself, I am constantly thinking about how IT leaders can handle all of the issues to protect the “mother ship” while proactively enabling their enterprises to get ahead of customer and business needs. No doubt, the job of the modern-day CIO is difficult!
Today’s business leaders are constantly preoccupied with meeting the ever-changing expectations of customers, ensuring that innovation drives profitable growth, while tackling highly competitive market dynamics. Matching the business drivers with new paradigms is at the heart of making IT not just an enabler of modern business, but a key competitive differentiator of the enterprise value proposition.
Over the last 40 years, the information technology era has brought innovation that underpins the modern business. Despite four decades of change, IT continues to evolve and facilitate new models of business and new avenues for value creation. The learnings and inventions of the past decades are now manifesting as new paradigms to procure, deploy and manage business information infrastructure. Gone are the days when large IT departments deployed clunky infrastructure with massive capital outlays for data center construction. Monolithic and rigid infrastructure choices that took years to deploy are frankly, no longer viable. Today’s IT capabilities must enable business transformation at a rapid pace, anticipate business needs, dynamically optimize costs and afford on-demand capacity – all while thwarting security risks and affording high availability.
Yet not all organizations take advantage of these potent capabilities as they lack the vision and expertise to future-proof their infrastructure. Businesses can face exponential viral growth in short periods of time and yet experience long lulls in growth (ex: financial markets, viral startups, retail sales). With traditional IT, such variation could only be supported with massive investments in sub-optimal capacity or by scrambling to add expensive capacity on demand.
Just a few weeks ago, I had a call with a CEO desperately looking for advice on how to transform his IT organization, starting at the top. Where IT was perceived as a “necessary evil,” it is now seen as a key, crucial differentiator to a company’s strategy and long-term sustainability. Modern business infrastructure can expand and contract on demand, and simultaneously cater to a wide spectrum of usage scenarios while delivering uniform customer experiences. Resilient ecosystems, infrastructure components and digital platforms are now available at scale in on-premise and public cloud variants. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2020, 90 percent of organizations will adopt hybrid infrastructure management.1
We are now in an era of “X-as-a-service” that allows for adding almost limitless incremental capacity without massive upfront investment. Data and application residencies whether on-premise or off have trade-offs related to costs, availability, and degree of control. Decisions must mitigate business risk while assuring business continuity in times of opportunity.
The change to on-demand and as-a-service models has not been limited to the way IT is procured. Today, software-driven approaches pervade all applications. New hardware blocks bring high modularity and flexibility to computing infrastructure. Software-driven provisioning, load balancing, and management give IT practitioners unprecedented visibility and control. Intel® Data Center Blocks (Intel® DCB) is a good example of how these approaches are bringing new versatility to businesses.
Forward-looking organizations are aggressively working to future-proof their business applications by tackling four fundamental aspects of digital infrastructure – availability, flexibility, security and total cost of ownership. For any specific application, these four aspects vary in importance and implementation details. Modern IT choices like public clouds, software-as-a-service, and on-premise data center blocks allow stakeholders to opt for the most cost-effective infrastructure for the application and seamlessly integrate the applications into the enterprise. Safeguarding a harmonious end-user experience despite very different underlying infrastructure models makes modern IT deliver superior service to enterprise stakeholders.
Every day I encounter customers performing the high-wire act of managing information. Modern IT is moving at a pace that means no individual or organization can have mastery over all the aspects. Arrow, for one, is focused on helping clients through the maze of options and delivering cost-effective results.
