Business IT departments are under significant pressure to rise to present IT demands. This means that IT is no longer responsible only for keeping the lights on; rather, it is now treated as a cost center and is responsible for playing a significant role in digital transformation.
As more of our daily lives and business opportunities shift into the digital world, there is a corresponding demand to prioritize IT activities within an organization. This shift has been disruptive for organizations with existing systems and operational models that failed to adapt quickly enough to meet business needs.
There is an imperative to deliver new modernized applications to market, to innovate with technology, and beat competitors, and to do it faster with more options. There are also requirements for stricter compliance, improved security, controlled costs, and increased efficiency. Lowering risk with disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity solutions s more critical than ever.
Traditional IT infrastructure is custom designed to fit particular needs of a business using any solution from any vendor. This flexibility comes with drawbacks, including the extensive time required for research and initial or expanded infrastructure ordered, installed, and ready to deploy applications. Infrastructure from multiple hardware and software vendors leads to separately managed operational silos, which rely on many IT staff members with different areas of expertise. Without centralized management, achieving security and compliance is much more difficult. When a problem occurs, support issues might result in circular finger pointing where vendors blame one another. Even with careful planning, upgrades run into complications and increased risk from interactions between products from different vendors.
Each product in this type of legacy stack is likely to be grossly overprovisioned, using its own resources (CPU, memory, and storage) to address the intermittent peak workloads of resident applications. The value of a single shared resource pool, offered by server virtualization, is still generally limited to the server layer. Low utilization of the overall stack results in a ripple effect of high acquisition, space, and power costs. Too many resources are wasted in traditional legacy environments.
Physical IT infrastructure consists of complex hardware silos that are difficult to manage or automate. Regular maintenance tasks and hardware outages require expensive downtime. Mitigating the problem using dedicated standby hardware is expensive. The hardware-centric architecture results in operational inefficiencies because of factors such as the limited capacity of the CPUs in running applications, a single operating system image per machine and inflexible infrastructure that is difficult to troubleshoot.
These problems can be mitigated by trading off a highly flexible choice of vendors and applications for building the infrastructure with a more standardized infrastructure that is easier to support and maintain. Traditional IT can use product compatibility lists to help alleviate multivendor support issues by reducing the scope of solutions that can be considered for use to only those products included in the compatibility list. However, without easy automation solutions and limited IT staff, achieving compliance is still challenging.
