The Chinese sage Lao Tzu once said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” In IT, the last mile of digital transformation is often the hardest part of the journey.
Consider that 94% of organizations surveyed identified the following top four barriers as impeding their path to the transformation finish line:
- Information overload
- An inability to extract valuable insights from data
- Data privacy and security
- Lack of budget and resources
These barriers all point to the same thing – organizations are struggling with data management. And yet despite an ever-increasing torrent of data and workloads flooding IT systems across hybrid, multi-cloud and edge locations, there are clamors from all corners of the business for still MORE data.
But how can organizations meet the demand for more data when they are having problems managing what’s already on hand? One thing to consider is the underlying infrastructure.
By modernizing your infrastructure, you can gain consistent operations, simplify data infrastructure management and enable your organization to innovate with data to stay competitive. Modernization is also key for laying the foundation for flexible IT and delivering a cloud-like experience for end users.
Modernized Infrastructure
Simplifying, automating and securing IT infrastructure are operational imperatives in the data decade. Organizations need solutions that deliver increased automation so that service level objectives for application performance (whether physical, virtual or containerized), security and data protection are consistently met across hybrid, multi-cloud and edge infrastructure.
Leading technologies that leverage AI/ML to automate IT delivery and tight integration with key management frameworks like VMware are necessary to ensure consistent and simplified operations wherever data and workloads reside. Infrastructure modernization also requires solutions that deliver increased data efficiencies so that as data grows, IT operational costs are kept in line.
As IT teams become less burdened with infrastructure care and feeding, they can begin spending more time with developers, data scientists and their business counterparts on enhancing their existing services, creating new products and delighting their customers.
Innovating with Data
Modernizing infrastructure at the edge is especially critical given Gartner’s prediction that 75% of all new data will originate outside the data center and the cloud by 2025. Building modern data pipelines that enable organizations to innovate with data in real time requires adaptable, scalable and increasingly autonomous compute, storage and networking solutions that simplify edge workload management. By consolidating infrastructure at the edge, organizations can eliminate data silos and build a sustainable IT footprint that can fluidly adapt and scale over time as data and workloads grow.
And by deploying solutions with the same consistency of operations everywhere, organizations can simplify and accelerate their transformation at the edge.
Flexible IT
Perhaps one of the surest signs of how far an organization is along their transformation journey is how flexible their IT environment is. Can end users deploy any workload into any cloud of their choice whether it is on-premises, at the edge or in the public cloud? Can it be done with speed, agility and efficiency while maintaining performance, availability, security and data protection service level objectives?
Many IT organizations want to deliver a cloud-like experience that gives their end users the best of what public and private cloud have to offer. The speed and agility of the public cloud, combined with the efficiency, security and consistency of operations of on-premises infrastructure. Many of these capabilities can be achieved via integrated hybrid cloud solutions, but another arrow in the IT quiver is “as-a-Service” solutions for private cloud environments.
By offloading infrastructure management, private cloud as-a-service solutions are an ideal way for IT organizations to simplify IT, deliver just-in-time application resource capabilities, maintain service level objectives and stretch IT budget and resources by switching from a cap-ex to an op-ex operating model.
The road less traveled
IT organizations don’t have to go it alone as they tackle the final mile of their transformation journey. Dell Technologies and our extensive ecosystem of partners, can help IT organizations accelerate transformation, position themselves for success in the data decade and be ready for whatever comes next. After all, as Lao Tzu once famously said, “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” With Dell Technologies by your side, your transformation journey is on sure footing.