Today’s businesses face ongoing pressure to be more agile and data-driven to meet the changing needs of customers, employees and partners. In this environment, companies that embrace IT Transformation and digital transformation are more competitive, innovative and efficient. More than 80% of IT decision-makers say if they don’t embrace IT Transformation, their companies won’t be competitive.
This means making investments that not only address today’s challenges, but also provide a pathway to the future. IT decision-makers must be savvy about how and when to use public cloud services—otherwise, they can expose the organization to cost overruns and security gaps. In addition, they must deploy infrastructure solutions that meet the more demanding performance, reliability, agility and security requirements of modern applications and workloads.
Being able to access real-world data in a timely manner gives IT teams a significant boost in making better, faster and more insightful decisions about when, where and how to invest in IT resources.
The 4-step plan
Here are four ways IT teams can be more efficient in leveraging data to support their organizations’ IT Transformation and digital transformation initiatives.
Collect: Whether implementing on-premises infrastructure or public cloud, IT can and must be more efficient in managing budgets. TechTarget research indicates that cloud services have been the top investment category for IT in 2018, yet there is still an average of 35% waste in cloud investments. Likewise with on-premises infrastructure, organizations still spend 80% of their IT budget on “keep the lights on functions,” with only a 20% spend on innovation. A key step to addressing those inefficiencies is to collect performance and utilization data from your existing environment to identify where your infrastructure can operate more efficiently and at a lower cost.
Visualize: It is important to collect the data in real time, leveraging automation to access the data quickly so you can visualize, analyze and act on it. Being able to visualize real-world data will help you avoid overspending on server and storage hardware. The data can also help you decide which technologies to invest in, whether it’s next-generation servers, all-flash storage, hyper-converged infrastructure or anything else.
Model: By modeling your workloads with real-world data, you can leverage deep insights into performance, workload simulations, utilization and support. This will help you take an evolutionary approach to IT Transformation, protecting existing investments and deploying solutions that prepare you for the future. Research from Enterprise Strategy Group shows that companies taking a data-driven approach to IT Transformation have been able to reduce infrastructure costs by 30% and provisioning costs by 80%, while improving utilization rates by 10% to 30%. These benefits improve the speed at which new services can be delivered, while enabling a more efficient IT infrastructure and organization.
Share: IT modernization is not simple, even with access to the organization’s critical workload data. IT professionals can gain tremendous advantage and save time by consulting with peers and colleagues, along with vendors and channel partners. With a social-media-like platform, you can gain access to varied experience and expertise by sharing your IT performance and workload data characteristics securely.
Business benefits
By taking these four steps, you can deliver more value to your business, including:
- Lower IT costs by eliminating the need to over-invest in infrastructure.
- Accelerate time-to-value by shortening purchase cycles and optimizing performance of business-critical workloads.
- Support hybrid, private and public clouds to increase agility, using real-world data to decide which workloads go in the cloud.
- Eliminate silos to reduce complexity and make IT more responsive to the strategic needs of the business.
- Improve security by streamlining IT and supporting consistent processes and procedures across the entire infrastructure.
Moving forward
Each of these capabilities is included in Live Optics, a software solution from Dell EMC that is available as a free download. Live Optics enables you to easily collect, visualize, model and share infrastructure performance and utilization data across all workloads. Live Optics is vendor-agnostic and can be used in virtually any hardware, software or cloud environment. For more information, visit Live Optics.
