Are Your IT Operations Ready for Digital Transformation?
Despite the hype surrounding it, digital transformation remains a priority for both IT and business decision makers. Around 70 percent of companies have a digital strategy in place or are working on one, according to ZedNet and businesses were forecast to spend more than $2 trillion on transformation projects in 2019, according to the State of the CIO report.
Businesses believe there are positive benefits — increased revenue was reported by 56 percent of CEOs responding to a Gartner survey and 39 percent of outperforming companies have developed a fully integrated digital-physical strategy, according to a study by Vision Critical.
But, for companies that have not yet started the transformation process, there may be perceived barriers facing the IT team – the wrong infrastructure, lack of skills, legacy products or challenging decisions about cloud or on-premise deployments.
This upcoming series of blogs looks at those issues and provides guidelines on the route forward. We hope it will provide a useful roadmap for the development and implementation of a successful digital transformation program.
Check Infrastructure Fitness
Digital transformation puts new demands on infrastructure. Users expect maximum uptime and the system must be scalable to handle variable demand. The infrastructure must have the capacity to handle increasing volumes of data together with the speed and agility to deliver new services fast.
That makes it essential to assess the infrastructure to ensure it can support digital transformation initiatives. The assessment should identify infrastructure components that need to be added or upgraded to support the transformation strategy.
The assessment provides the basis for planning investments and upgrades to align infrastructure more closely with the needs of a digital enterprise. Although infrastructure assessment is a time-consuming task, automated tools such as VTG’s ZENfraTM can simplify and speed up the process.
Set a Flexible Data Center Migration Strategy
Cloud has proved to be the environment of choice for organizations planning or implementing a digital transformation. However, cloud may not be suitable for applications or services where security or compliance, particularly for mission-critical applications, such as ERP, HR or finance.
The data center migration strategy must take account of those issues and, if necessary, support a hybrid environment. That means the on-premise infrastructure must offer the levels of performance, scalability and agility of its cloud equivalent. Infrastructure upgrading will therefore form an important part of the overall migration and transformation project.
Re-engineer Applications for the Digital Environment
Digital transformation demands software that helps your employees work more efficiently and ensure that your customers get the best possible experience when they use your digital applications and services. To get full value from those products and services, it’s important that they take advantage of the latest technologies. The products must be suitable for cloud and mobile working and offer the levels of performance and security users and customers expect.
Re-engineering the product for cloud deployment ensures that remote and mobile workers can make full use of their software. Cloud deployment also ensures that the upgraded product is scalable, which is important if you plan to grow the user base. Reengineering can also improve performance through code that runs faster, reduces response times and requires fewer resources. And, it provides an opportunity to add functionality to create software that has greater market appeal.
Close the Skills Gap
Digital transformation initiatives require a wide range of cloud, migration, infrastructure, networking, security, application and project management skills. The projects are time consuming and can divert attention from day-to-day operational responsibilities.
That wide range of skills may not be available in house, particularly where the organization operates a mixed environment of cloud, on-premise and legacy infrastructure and applications. As an alternative, many organizations close the gap by working with specialist partners who take responsibility for migration projects or managing IT resources on a day-to-day basis. This frees the internal team for priority tasks and helps accelerate transformation.
Find out More
If digital transformation is a strategic priority for your organization, it’s important to overcome these barriers to progress. VTG can help with advice and professional services to help accelerate your transformation. If you would like to find out more about our migration, cloud and infrastructure services, please check out the articles and infographics on our website.