It’s no secret that technology is changing every industry. According to IDC, digital transformation spending will grow to more than 50% of all IT and communications investment. Furthermore, organizations that neglect to invest in market-driven operations risk losing market share to existing competitors and new digital market entries.
Every organization, large and small, must rethink how to engage with customers, employees, partners and vendors. That means digitally transforming business processes to respond to increased online competition and the resulting explosive growth in data capital. This shift includes taking advantage of big data analytics and artificial intelligence, accelerating business innovation through DevOps and optimizing IT through hybrid cloud operations.
There are some challenges, however, exacerbated by IT staff who are now remote, with less time inside the data center to integrate, manage, scale and implement new IT infrastructure to support transformation.
Under a five-pronged transformation program, McKinsey & Company advises companies to:
- Rethink who they are, how to work and how to grow
- Accelerate digital adoption to enable reimagination
- Refocus digital efforts to reflect changing customer expectations
- Use data, the Internet of Things and AI to better manage operations
- Accelerate tech modernization
As you’ll learn in this series of TechTarget articles, modernization is about infrastructure, automation and hybrid cloud strategy.
Evaluating IT modernization options
As you evaluate IT modernization solutions for your data center, consider infrastructure attributes―commonly associated with converged and hyperconverged infrastructure systems―that offer distinct advantages for digital transformation:
- Engineered systems: A full technology stack (compute, storage, data protection and network technologies) engineered together for consolidating a broad range of virtualized, containerized and bare-metal applications and workloads. This provides complete harmony between hardware and software.
- Manufactured for a turnkey experience: Application- and workload-ready systems delivered with the technologies needed to meet your specific performance, capacity, resiliency and data protection requirements. This simplifies deployment and speeds time to value, generating value from your investment faster and future-proofed to expand and integrate new technologies as they evolve.
- Managed with intelligent automation: Cloud-like operations with near-zero-touch automation for deployment, expansion, lifecycle management and consumption of data center infrastructure. Automation injects more agility into your organization, lowers risk, lowers Opex and frees staff to focus on applications and services that drive digital transformation and business success.
- Supported as a single solution: One phone number and one organization to support the entire stack of hardware and software. A holistic response partner means faster time to resolution and proactive avoidance of problems impacting the business, as well as lower Opex.
- Lifecycle managed: Programmatic delivery of pretested technical updates and security patches to components, keeping all system components in an interoperable, optimized and secure state. This removes risk, eliminates costly Opex and evolves system capabilities faster.
- Cloud consumption: Infrastructure-as-a-service economics that let you pay for exactly the resources you use and no more, with on-premises resources expanding to meet temporary or seasonal workload requirements. This model is price competitive with public cloud and offers cloud-enabled storage and data protection for hybrid cloud operations.
Looking ahead
Digital transformation can’t wait. Success depends on rethinking your organization and implementing IT infrastructure and operations modernization to enable it.
To help you start your modernization evaluation, TechTarget and Dell Technologies have teamed to launch an information hub with three related articles:
- 5 Advantages of Modernizing IT with Converged and Hyperconverged Infrastructure
- Transform Your IT Organization with Automation and Converged and Hyperconverged Infrastructure
- Converged and Hyperconverged Infrastructure: The New Foundation for Hybrid Cloud Strategy
The site provides tips and guidance, including analyst white papers, videos and short on-demand webinars. For additional resources, you can go directly to Dell Technologies converged and hyperconverged infrastructure.
