Over the past 15 years, IT has worked in a pretty predictable manner.
By Ossama El Samadoni, senior director: sales for Middle East, Russia, Africa and Turkey at Dell Technologies
In order to automate critical business processes, companies have been implementing packaged applications from established software vendors.
In turn, IT departments have focused the bulk of their efforts on building and managing the infrastructure needed to run such applications, as well as developing the skills needed to deliver guaranteed service levels across the business.
As a result, companies have invested heavily in infrastructure related to enterprise applications, peaking in recent years at around $2,7-trillion.
But all of this has started to change now. With the rise of mobile devices, cloud computing, social media, the Internet of Things (IoT) and other disruptive forces, the way applications are built, deployed and utilised has transformed significantly.
In order to capture digital revenue streams, develop smarter products and deliver the vastly improved experiences that customers expect, companies – including their IT departments – need to undergo significant transformation.
Along with running large enterprise applications for automation, companies need to continuously develop the consumer-grade mobile applications and embedded software that will transform their products, their services, and the ways in which they engage with the world.
All of this must be done, while simultaneously lowering costs and refining the performance of older applications and the infrastructure on which they run.
The only way to achieve both of these goals – innovate and optimise – is to transform the technology we use to deliver IT services.
This begins with bringing down the cost and effort involved in running the older automation software packages – so that IT can shift its human and financial resources toward other investments that help make possible the more transformational aspects of the business: ever-changing mobile experiences, better data analytics, and deeper innovation around products and services.
A dilemma for IT executives
The tension that arises between modernising as rapidly as possible is a challenge for most companies.
To succeed on both fronts, IT leaders are realizing that they must undergo significant transformation across the organisation, from re-evaluating on- and off-premise infrastructure investments to making changes in staffing and skills training, engaging more deeply with different departments and upping the commitment to IT-as-a-service delivery.
In most cases, this is new territory and many are looking for guidance to navigate as effectively as possible.
The modern data centre begins with infrastructure
The first step toward supporting these often-conflicting IT priorities is to modernise the infrastructure components on which IT is built or, rather, to become a modern data centre.
In the past, IT departments built their infrastructure and bought their applications, but now they’re increasingly looking to invert that model.
They want to buy simple, easy-to-deploy infrastructure platforms on which they can quickly build and run core business applications that differentiate their businesses, while also providing a platform for deploying next-generation applications.
Converged infrastructure allows for both. All-in-one storage, compute, and network platforms simplify, speed up, and radically transform the traditional IT process of building things out component by component.
It reduces the time and cost of procuring, deploying, configuring, and managing hardware and software components separately, accelerating time to value for IT investments.
Additionally, it’s essential that converged systems are built on technologies that are third-platform ready – such as flash, scale-out, software-defined, and cloud-enabled systems.
Automate everything: just do it
Once a plan is made to modernise data centre infrastructure, the next step is to automate everything. Any manual process that is done as a predictable, repeatable step must be ruthlessly eliminated via management and orchestration tools up and down the IT stack.
Full-scale automation is the single most transformative change in IT delivery today. Once full-scale automation processes are in place, full-scale IT transformation can proceed.
And, while IT services can be modernized and automated using hardware and software approaches to deliver the true well-run hybrid cloud experience that supports multiple CIO priorities, IT itself must continuously transform the people and processes that deliver business outcomes.
Accelerated digitisation is a significant driver of the data centre market across Africa
According to a report from ResearchandMarket.com, the data centre market in Africa is likely to grow at a CAGR of 14% during 2018-2024.
As governments and enterprises move forward with their digital transformation agendas, there is an increasing need to migrate from server room operations to data centre services such as managed services, co-location and hybrid infrastructure.
In summary
All of this only begins to tell the story of where businesses and IT teams are heading in the transformation process thanks to rapid digitization and market opportunity.
The paradigms associated with datacenter technology will continue to evolve dramatically and as they do, new skills, tools and resources will come into play.
There is no end point for transformation – it’s as constant as human creativity and innovation – but there is a beginning.