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The Changing Dynamics of IT Creating Massive Efficiencies and Adding Value to Businesses
Naveen Mishra, Research Director, Gartner
Naveen Mishra, Research Director, Gartner
Today, a true digital environment reflects how businesses and technology operate together. Backed by evolving IT trends, businesses are able to create massive efficiencies and bring in more value at a lower cost and provide agility to the development processes. Behind this evolution is a shift from traditional systems to more agile IT infrastructure. CIOs keep a positive outlook to accept the rising trends of Big Data analytics, enterprise mobility and Unified communications.
Data Center and Its Economics
As the volume of data proliferates across all industries, organizations have geared up to optimize their cost of data center operations. CIOs and other IT leaders explore the comprehensive picture of the current challenges prevailing in a data center today. With uncertainty in economics data centers spread across geographies demand high degree of maintenance in order to operate efficiently. Few glaring issues surrounding the data center plague every organization irrespective of size. Huge capital expenditure in maintaining data centers hinder the growth of the organizations. In addition, the economics get impacted with disparate technology input that uses tenets and scales. Depending upon the scale the specific tenet can cost fairly high. However, this trend is more active in the US market as compared to India. Older assets and legacy infrastructures consume more power and space and it can be problematic as well critical to maintain and provide timely vendor support for its maintenance.
Institutions like Gartner, advises the CEO and CIO to contrive a data center strategy that has a potential to impact the businesses without spending money on things that are less critical or important.
Often companies put immense amounts of capital expenditure into the designing of infrastructure to collect and pool data. However, they get wrong and make many errors while processing the data and incorporating business intelligence especially real time intelligence into operational decision making. CIOs should focus on the salient factors that propel the move of data processing and consequently optimize business performance with data in real time. Security has gained prominence with the rise in information stored in data centers. One potential security risk that arises from cloud platform is when information is captured and utilized from multiple sources and which is accessible from anywhere on internet. To overcome the security issues, CIOs should bolster the security strategies and formalize the security frameworks with encrypted access everywhere. Unfortunately, India has been treating security as a low priority and with years to come, CIOs must minimize the occurrence of breaches with a strong defense against security threats within or outside corporate networks.
Alignment of Internet of Things and Data Center to Impact the Business Value
The fast evolving Internet of Things is expected to have a tremendous impact on the data centers. IoT relates the entire hardware, IT infrastructure and applications. Starting from the infrastructure technology, Internet of Things shifts to services and applications. IoT connects the Infrastructure technology with the intelligent software and detects the processing and functions accordingly. In terms of data centers, IoT has the ability to cast transformational effect on the data center market. These IoT deployments generate lot of data which needs to processed and analyzed at the same time. The extent of network connections and data associated with the IoT focus on the need to deploy more forward-looking capacity management platforms that can include a data center infrastructure management (DCIM) system approach of supporting IT and operational technology and be able to provide the production facility to process the IoT data points based on the priorities and business needs, and consequently impact the business value.
Right Balance of Rolling out Technology in New and Innovative Ways
Enterprises are embracing technology in the way they do business and market new products. CIOs have two conflicting objectives when it comes to improving businesses in a traditional or futuristic way. CIOs are trying to find the right balance of rolling out technology in new and innovative ways without adding more complexity to their existing business environments. With growing challenges in building an agile IT infrastructure platform by keeping the IT cost as low as possible, CIOs today rely on digitization and try to bridge the gap between traditional IT and emerging IT to address myriad of customer needs.
