Technology is here to make our lives and jobs easier, so we can be more productive. Everywhere we turn we are surrounded by it! I start my day being awoken by my digital radio alarm clock, I drink an espresso from my coffee machine that tells me when I need to order more and I get in my car which tells me where there’s a traffic incident so I can best avoid it. The data that powers these devices is crunched and stored in dense server farms housed in data centers all over the world.
Who would have thought 10 years ago that we would use our mobiles phone for EVERYTHING today rather than just to make and receive calls? We play music and games, we exchange messages, pictures, videos and emails, we use them to keep in touch with our family and friends through social media, we buy groceries, we book flights and hotels, we trade stocks….. the list is endless.
Technology has evolved rapidly over recent years and people have adapted themselves in the same short period of time to keep pace with everyone and everything out there. We’ve moved on from the so-called ‘mobile phones’ to having computers in our pockets that help with all manner of tasks. If you are using a mobile device to improve your own productivity or to ease your personal life, think for a second how critical it is for businesses to use the right technology – it helps them reduce risk, stabilise costs and increase productivity to be able to maximise profits.
So what is Digital Transformation? It’s just a term used by organisations to encapsulate how, by adopting the latest technology they are able to transform their business operations. The outcome of this is a reduction in risk, the ability to stabilise costs, and increase employee productivity so they can ensure they remain competitive in their chosen market. Digital transformation can be achieved by introducing the latest software technologies. These technologies provide greater agility by helping organisations turn the data collected over the years into information to be used amongst the workforce to improve their products or service time to market and exceed their customer expectations.
Software solutions such as ERP, CRM and Payroll are readily available and more recently container-based architectures with micro services too. All of these solutions serve different business functions with the shared goal of simplifying the operations. But have you ever thought what is needed to make these softwares run seamlessly?
You guessed it! With great software comes the pre-requisite of great hardware! While the software’s have evolved over the years to perform more complex operations, they have also reduced the manual operations needed with the focus on automation (reduction of decisions and clicks required to perform any such update or change request). While companies invest hundreds and millions of Pounds on modern software’s, they forget the fact that the underlying hardware required to run these software’s needs to be modernised as well. Companies need to transform the infrastructure to be able to achieve the ultimate goal.
So, does transformation of IT mean more powerful servers, storage and networking? Not exactly! Transformation of IT not only means to have the latest and greatest performing machines, but also, have an infrastructure, which is agile in nature, an infrastructure which offers business continuity and is capable of handling disaster recovery.
Software defined data center and its components is what the world is moving towards. This means allowing the software to do the heavy lifting there by reducing your dependence on hardware. For example, many vendors are moving their customers from a traditional server, networking and storage architecture to much simpler Hyper-Converged infrastructure which allows you to manage all the three of these components within a single pane of glass of management. How cool is that?
So why do you need to transform your datacenter? Simple! It allows your company to be more relevant, more successful and more profitable. We all remember the words of Stephen Elop, the CEO of Nokia, just before their acquisition by Microsoft “we did not do anything wrong, but somehow we lost”.
You may be a profitable business today; you may even be market leaders in your chosen area. But if you do not keep up with the market trends of transforming your business or transforming the technology used by your business, your chance of maintaining that position in the market is almost zero.
If you need help and guidance to better understand where you are today and how to get to where you want to be, please reach out to our digital transformation experts and we can guide you through that journey in order to achieve your business goals.
