Business can no longer afford for IT to be a cost center. In the ever-transforming economy of today, ideas are the new currency of business and IT is the ATM that will deliver them. It is not just about ideas though, it is about how fast you can bring those ideas into the market where they can bring value to customers and profits to business. Resources and customers gravitate to new ideas that bring value. In order for IT to take the lead in this new world, it must become faster and more agile. In order to do this, it must break the chains of the traditional data center that weighs it down and instead implement a new means of delivering and managing technology. That new system is Composable Infrastructure. It will allow IT to break free from the ordinary and accelerate the extraordinary, ensuring its new role as a value creation partner for the enterprise.
As a continuum to our discussion outlining the realized benefits of Composable Infrastructure (read part one of this blog post), here are five more reasons why your business cannot ignore this exciting new architype that is allowing IT to lead the digital transformation of their respected organizations.
- Fluid IT
In the not-too-distant past, IT transformation within an organization was defined by months if not years. Most transformations were initiated by the need for new hardware or to introduce new operating systems every few years. These vast time windows allowed IT the luxury of taking up to six months to move from the birth of an idea to implementation. That luxury is no longer affordable or even viable. According to HPE, a leading authority on how to succeed in the idea economy, composable infrastructure will help compress these time windows by converting the hardware dominated data center to a more fluid adaptable ecosystem that can accommodate perpetual change. Says HPE, “IT can accelerate the application development cycle by leveraging infrastructure-as-code. Application developers using DevOps methodologies can rapidly provision infrastructure and applications together in a single action because infrastructure becomes code through the unified API.”
- IT Economics
Maintaining legacy IT infrastructure is expensive. The entire process is a black hole that not only translates into costs that add little value to the organization, but consume the time and attention of the IT staff as well. Instead of contributing ideas of innovation and value, IT professionals waste their intellect and creativity on mindless tasks such as firmware updates and silo migrations. On top of that, until the acceptance of virtualization, IT budgets were further penalized by the common practice of over-provisioning in which purchasing is based on the possible needs of tomorrow rather than utilization levels of today.
A composable infrastructure solution from HPE allows you to address these cost-control issues by reducing operational efforts through template-driven, frictionless operations made possible by software-defined intelligence and automation. Rather than implementing the best guess strategy of over-provisioning, right-sized resources are delivered and allocated for every application.
- Competitive Advantages
In an era in which a new entrant into the market place can cripple long time established organizations through the successful implementation of a new idea, the competitiveness of the global economy is unprecedented. Companies today must constantly cultivate new ideas and innovations or risk becoming another victim fallen to disruptive indifference. In order to succeed, companies must work in collaboration with IT in order to ensure that new ideas are fully capitalized on and delivered. IT must move from a manager of backend operations, to being on the forefront, leading the efforts to initiate and deliver value. An HPE composable infrastructure solution can make it easier to manage IT projects and systems. This 'composable' approach frees up significant time and resources that can then be dedicated to customer-facing improvements.
- Future-proofed data center
Under the constraints of the traditional data center, IT managers undertook tremendous risks trying to discern which rigid hardware solution to invest in next. Choosing incorrectly meant being saddled with the wrong type of infrastructure for many years. In the Idea Economy in which enormous change is ever constant, businesses need a much more flexible ecosystem that can handle future generations of computing, no matter what direction these technologies may take. Composable infrastructure is the extendable platform that hybrid IT enterprises demand in order to accommodate the anticipated necessities of today–and the unpredictable loads of tomorrow.
- Seamless Evolution
In the past, the adaption of new technologies was a scary undertaking, requiring arduous levels of change. It required tireless hours of planning, preparation and training. Thankfully, it is easy to get started with integrating composable infrastructure into the data center. Rather than an all or nothing approach, the technology can be deployed incrementally, side-by-side with existing resources and can be deployed as part of your standard refresh cycle, giving you the ability to grow your capabilities at a pace that makes sense for your business.
