Healthy Infrastructure Accelerates Digital Transformation
Infrastructure Transformation Accelerates Digital Transformation
While ‘digital everything’ is often high on the agenda for businesses planning digital transformation, some commentators are now focusing on the important role that traditional IT infrastructure transformation should play as a foundation for digital success. An agile, efficient infrastructure has been described as the ‘backbone of the digital revolution’.
Traditional on-premise infrastructure remains important even as cloud migration continues to grow. That’s partly because it’s essential to support mission-critical tasks that remain on-premise. But it’s also vital to rationalize existing infrastructures to avoid high cloud migration costs.
While many important business applications and services have moved to the cloud, the workloads that remain on premises are likely to be strategic, particularly if they are part of the new product development process. Those workloads and the infrastructure that support them help give IT a key role developing new practices and services to differentiate the digital organization.
Changing Focus for IT
The IT team's time has traditionally been split between ‘keeping the lights on’, managing the cloud, and working on new service opportunities. Now, the focus must shift to new developments.
IT infrastructure transformation therefore aims to simplify, standardize and scale existing infrastructure, so that IT gains the agility to respond quickly to changing business conditions and new technologies.
By simplifying the infrastructure, IT teams can reduce the time spent on routine maintenance tasks, increase efficiency and focus their resources on innovation, developing value-added services and maintaining an optimum user experiences. From a financial perspective, infrastructure transformation helps IT makes it easier to allocate budgets to new projects by reducing the cost of managing infrastructure. .
Time for Transformation
So what’s the starting point for infrastructure transformation? It’s important to first develop the right private, public or hybrid cloud strategy for your business and create a plan that covers all the requirements of your chosen platform — including your on-premise infrastructure.
You should also carry out an infrastructure maturity assessment, working with a specialist such as VTG. An assessment service typically reviews business and IT drivers, and analyzes existing workloads and applications, as well as business, technology and operational processes to document your infrastructure maturity level.
An infrastructure healthcheck, which should be carried out by an independent specialist, is also essential to evaluate how well your infrastructure and network components are performing. The healthcheck can help you identify strengths and weaknesses, and resolve potential issues, as well as suggesting design enhancements and other improvements as part of your infrastructure transformation project.
Strategic Changes
The healthcheck provides the basis for detailed recommendations on transformation as part of a strategic roadmap. The aim is to develop a flexible, optimized infrastructure IT system that is highly scalable and responsive to your changing business and technical needs. By improving the performance of your infrastructure, you can reduce costs, improve availability and deliver new services faster.
Automation will also contributes to the success of your transformation project by reducing timescales, cutting time-consuming manual processes, increasing accuracy and eliminating the risk of human error. You should identify and assess automation opportunities, and incorporate them in your transformation plan. This will help simplify the transformation, as well as ongoing operations, to ensure your infrastructure continues to deliver benefits in the most cost-effective way.
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If you would like to know more about our infrastructure maturity, healthcheck and transformation services, please check out the articles and infographics on our website.