Agile IT Empowers Business Success
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An agile data center allows businesses to adapt quickly to changing market conditions by enabling rapid deployment of new applications and technologies. This helps drive new products and services to help the business thrive. An agile IT department leverages advanced technologies like virtualization and software-defined data centers to securely deliver the right services to users in a scalable and flexible way. While an IT transformation requires investment, establishing an agile infrastructure focused on information delivery can help an organization respond faster to opportunities and threats.
Agile IT Empowers Business Success
- 1. Agile IT Empowers Business Success In a hyper-connected world, the agile data center helps grow the business by delivering the right services to users in a scalable, flexible and secure Contents • The Back End Drives the Front End............................................................................................... 2 • Business Transformation.............................................................................................................. 2 • New Models of IT Agility................................................................................................................ 3 • Transformation Is More Than Technology...................................................................................... 4 • The Right Services........................................................................................................................ 5 • Rewards and Risks....................................................................................................................... 5 • Conclusion.................................................................................................................................... 6 A TECHTARGET WHITE PAPER Brought to you compliments of Businesses today compete at the speed of thought. Nobody can afford to stand still; if a company isn’t looking to render its best-selling products or services obsolete, somebody else will be—and that might be a known competitor or a stealthy startup. At their best, IT departments are at the forefront of this change, enabling agile transformations of business service delivery to employees and customers. Unfortunately, while IT strives to deliver against its capabilities, too often those capabilities may be restricted because of legacy systems.
- 2. If the business can’t adapt, it may not thrive. Let’s rephrase that: If the business can’t adapt, it may not survive. That’s why an agile data center requires a sturdy yet flexible infrastructure, one that can withstand pressures, yet bend quickly to follow market requirements and enable rapid deployment of new applications and technologies that will drive products and services. Many companies have gone from market domination to a position of weakness, simply by not adapting to changing market conditions. Perhaps a new technology came along, yet the company persisted with the old ways. New paradigms in sales and marketing. New product categories. New ways of envisioning consumer demand, re-inventing the supply chain—or reimagining a new product category that destroys a thriving one. Buggy whips, anyone? The Back End Drives the Front End While consumers these days see mobile apps driving innovation, those are merely the last-mile delivery system. The real enablers of technology are the back-end data centers, both in the cloud and within the enterprise. An agile organization has a data center and IT department that can leverage advanced technology to monitor critical applications, ensure system uptime and protect the integrity of critical data across heterogeneous platforms, whether on-premises or in the cloud. Consider how Amazon.com’s online ordering system changed how books (and other products, of course) are sold—affecting bricks-and-mortar sales of both new and used books. Craigslist connects buyers and sellers (and employers and job seekers) instantly—bypassing traditional newspaper classified advertisements. Apple’s iPod and other digital music players wiped out the Sony Walkman and other cassette and CD players. Indeed, digital music downloads took away from all forms of physical music sales—and now free and subscription-based “Internet radio stations” like Pandora are offering yet another business model. Banks used apps to enable home and mobile banking—including taking pictures of checks, instead of depositing them at a branch or an automated teller machine. Business Transformation Let’s dig deeper into one such case: At its peak in 2004, Blockbuster Video Entertainment Inc. had more than 9,000 stores renting out movies on VHS tapes and DVD discs. Customers would go to their local Blockbuster store, check the new releases, browse the older films, pay to rent one or more items, and bring the tapes or discs home. Remember the admonition, “Be Kind, Rewind”? A day or two later, customers would bring back the tapes or discs … or pay late fees. The model was simple: The store’s 2 www.symantec.com
- 3. role was to stock the content and collect money. It was the customer’s job to go to the store, search through the stock of tapes and discs, decide which movies to rent, bring the desired tapes and discs to the cashier, and return them later. Today, Blockbuster is a mere shadow of its former self. Why? The company missed innovations in customer service, inventory management, product delivery and customer interaction. A huge cause of Blockbuster’s demise was Netflix, founded in 1997. Netflix completely redefined movie delivery not once, but twice: first with DVDs-by-mail, and then later, with instant streaming over the Internet. With its DVDs-by-mail business model, Netflix changed the game: • DVDs are delivered by the postal service, and returned by the postal service. Customers never need to go pick up a movie—or return one. • There are no late fees. Customers pay a monthly subscription fee for one, two, three or more movies—and keep them for as long as they want. • Netflix allows customers to set up a queue, and will choose movies from that queue to send without additional customer interaction. • Netflix uses sophisticated algorithms to recommend movies to customers based on their prior rental pattern and the movies’ ratings. • Netflix set up large warehouses and systems for the rapid processing of incoming and outgoing discs; it didn’t need storefronts, local inventory or retail staff. Netflix’s innovative business strategy is supported and continues to be enabled by sophisticated IT systems. By contrast, Blockbuster couldn’t transform its operations fast enough (despite its own attempt to offer a competing disc-by-mail service), and failed in the marketplace. Today, Netflix has evolved beyond its own DVDs-by-mail business by streaming movies and TV shows over the Internet. Netflix’s competitors, such as Amazon, Hulu, Apple, YouTube and Roku, must be agile to compete and survive; Netflix must be equally agile to remain competitive. New Models of IT Agility Business agility requires IT agility, and not only in technology companies. From landscaping to retailing, from education to logistics, from banking to health care, all but the small organizations must be able to rapidly adapt to changing market conditions by the use of IT. That’s true with back-end systems, as is seen by the rapid adoption of the cloud, including Software-as-a-Service and the virtual data center. 3 www.symantec.com
- 4. The back end is vital, and so are the front ends to the IT infrastructure. Customers want to interact directly with companies through apps, Web portals and social media. Partners require access through application programming interfaces. Everything must be integrated. Everything must be secure. Privacy must be maintained. Uptime must meet aggressive service-level requirements. Moves, adds and changes must happen in minutes, not days. Systems must scale instantly. For many business leaders, IT can seem like a millstone: The CEO has an idea, a product manager has a revelation, a competitor makes a move that must be countered. Can IT respond? Perhaps yes, perhaps not. There’s no doubt that IT must be agile to support the business. If it can, the business is in a strong competitive position. If not, IT must transform itself to add agility, capacity, flexibility and responsiveness. Transformation Is More Than Technology Agile transformation is not easy. The process of reinventing an IT organization requires cultural changes, as well as new technologies and infrastructures. Not only must top business executives buy into the need for transformation, but so must senior IT staff. There’s a financial cost, in hardware, software, training and services. While the transformed IT department might have lower ongoing operational costs, there must be investment to define and create architectures, find new business partners, license software, transform and migrate applications and data, and implement ongoing IT management systems. All of those costs represent risks: risks that the company won’t choose the right technologies or architectures, risks that old habits will emerge, and risks that financial resources won’t be used effectively. Fortunately, best practices can help chart a solid course. As long as the goals of the IT transformation are well understood, the move to a more agile IT footing can be done with reasonable cost, in reasonable time and with minimal risk. One such goal that all leaders should agree on: Information and applications are the lifeblood of the organization, IT’s focus should be on enabling and improving access to information, protecting data and accelerating the delivery of services and information to customers and employees. There is a subtly dangerous temptation for entrenched IT departments to prioritize preservation of legacy physical infrastructure like servers and networks, familiar technology platforms such as operating systems, large-scale applications and databases, and long-standing vendor relationships. This is understandable, as those are expensive corporate assets that are well known throughout the company. 4 www.symantec.com
- 5. Legacy systems are deeply entrenched in budgets and culture—and in many cases are perfectly suited for managing today’s organizational needs. However, an IT department that devotes too many financial and staff resources to maintaining legacy systems may be hampered in its ability to help the company seize new business opportunities or respond to competitive challenges. An agile IT department focuses on the information layer, rather than legacy systems and hardware platforms. It then employs technology to improve the management of that information to better serve the needs of the business —despite the underlying infrastructure. This way, organizations look toward the future—not the past—and make the most out of their existing infrastructure, while (in some cases) reinventing core capabilities. With limited resources, this is really the only way to successfully improve IT agility. The Right Services What does agility require? From the business perspective, IT resources must be fast to create and change; services must be resilient and, of course, cost effective both now and for the foreseeable future. The infrastructure should be secure, elastically scalable and easily recoverable if faults are found or predicted. Data must be assessable and implemented with the proper access controls to protect the business, employees and customers—while also meeting regulatory and compliance requirements. To put it another way, an agile IT department delivers the right services, in the right way, to the right users—all the time. One approach to consider when implementing agile IT transformation is the software-defined data center (SDDC). As the name implies, the SDDC is based on the extensive use of virtual machine technology, such as from VMware or Microsoft’s Hyper-V. With SDDC, virtualization abstracts applications from servers or even specific locations. Deployment, provisioning and management are implemented in software, and can work whether the applications are in a local data center, a remote data center, private clouds or all of the above. In an agile data center, IT can and should take all elements of service delivery into account. Those might be physical, or they might be virtual, such as with the SDDC. Depending on its requirements, IT can leverage both virtual and physical infrastructure to provide services that offer the best performance, cost, scalability and elasticity. Rewards and Risks The SDDC is not without risks. A virtualized environment must be secured against data breaches, just as much as a physical environment, and must comply with regulations and privacy policies. The SDDC 5 www.symantec.com
- 6. must be configured for high availability and disaster recovery. It must be managed with sophisticated tools that understand not only the virtual environment, but also the applications and information living in those environments. The agile data center model needs a sophisticated management layer that includes platform-agnostic discovery and contextual insights, support for extremely heterogeneous environments, automation and deeply integrated security. The management system should also be open, allowing integration of many vendors’ solutions. In other words, the management layer must support the real world. It must also support smart automation, helping ensure that policies are applied accurately and consistently. What’s more, during any IT transformation, the migration from physical servers running local applications to virtual servers running applications must be carefully managed every step of the way. Downtime is unthinkable, and it can be difficult (or impossible) to roll back changes if faults are discovered in the system architecture or implementation. This is especially true when the plan is to run a hybrid data center, combining both traditional and virtual services with hosted services from partners and cloud providers. Effective administration and management of such a complex environment is essential—as stated earlier—with a focus on users, applications and information. Symantec can be a valuable partner in IT transformation, including approaches like the implementation of an agile data center, with elasticity, smart policies and the intelligence and automation to help improve service delivery—and business responsiveness. Symantec can help improve IT service delivery in data centers; public, private and hybrid clouds; and from external service devices. What’s more, Symantec can help IT gain a 360-degree view of its infrastructure, data, services and users, while protecting applications and data. Conclusion IT agility is essential for thriving—or surviving—in today’s complex business environments. By delivering the right services in the right way, to the right users, IT can help businesses seize opportunities and respond to competitive threats quickly, thereby serving the business’s future rather than preserving yesterday’s legacy solutions. One best-practices approach is to re-invent the IT infrastructure as a SDDC. With the right management tools to address the risks, the SDDC’s virtual environment can be the right solution for many forward-thinking organizations that must compete at the speed of thought. 6 © TechTarget 2014