CIOs must confront a growing reality: the comfort zone of the IT landscape they have long known is undergoing a sea change. Market forces and business goals have forced IT systems and the people that support them to adopt new thresholds of agility. They must become untethered to anachronistic IT topologies and embrace systems that permit them to rapidly seize new markets. The need to deliver services closer to the customer and to orient workloads that address business, regulatory and geopolitical forces will become the new high watermark for IT performance.
The Emerging New IT Landscape
The growth of interconnect services, cloud providers, IoT, edge services and SaaS offerings have already begun to alter the IT landscape. Data centers will need to adapt to this new paradigm. Amidst this turmoil of change, the goals remain unchanged: deliver reliable, uninterrupted services to customers and serve the needs of the enterprise.
What’s needed is software that can efficiently manage the new paradigm of hybrid IT, which is where the application workload and data reside. As many enterprises have found, it no longer matters where data actually resides—be it on premises, cloud, or other virtual site. What matters is the ability to continue measuring, monitoring and optimizing for efficiency and cost benefits.
Service-Driven Infrastructure Strategies
In creating digital infrastructure delivery strategies, business value increasingly outweighs moving to the cloud. When building an IT strategy, the application portfolio should take precedence over the physical infrastructure. A traditional IT architecture should give way to a strategy that is service-driven. The focus should be on compliance, data protection, security, latency, resiliency, reputation, service continuity, location, availability, and performance. So it falls on CIOs and their teams to replace older workloads with an “as a service” offering to meet specific business needs.
Part of any solution that addresses the ever-changing landscape of IT should include a distributed digital infrastructure. Benefits must be weighed for each application workload and data that serves it. One should strive for reduced latency, improved customer experience, stronger service continuity, and improved compliance.
Technologies that Efficiently Manage the Hybrid IT Model
As enterprises segue toward distributed digital infrastructures, typically with a hybrid mix of sourcing and architectures, an asset’s physical location (or process) may become less clearly delineated. IT-defined businesses will need to invest in technologies that efficiently manage a hybrid IT model.
CIOs who already have enough on their agenda in these changing times must now face the challenges of implementing, understanding and supporting new layers of integration, orchestration, customization, and configuration. To complicate matters, existing teams must not only stay on top of current needs but find ways to work with other teams in bifurcated structures that support the goals of today’s and tomorrow’s digital business. IT techs and similar workers who must work in environments where the “rubber meets the road” can become quickly overwhelmed and will partition themselves and their work tasks. This flies in the face of IT needs that demand overview thinking to address increasingly complex infrastructures.
Enter Distributed Digital Infrastructure Management
Software management providers like Tuangru offer the distributed digital infrastructure management (or DDIM) tools to manage today’s hybrid IT environments. These tools have been specifically designed to monitor distributed IT environments and include devices, subnets, domains, data centers, edge deployments and/or service providers. The focus is on asset discovery, monitoring, KPI metrics, optimization, dependency mapping and location of both physical and logical assets.
The IT landscape is experiencing upheavals in virtually every area. Market forces and business goals have forced IT systems and the people that support them to become agile, responsive, and workforce efficient. The solution lies in distributed digital infrastructure management, which not only addresses current needs but those on the horizon.
About Jad Jebara
Jad Jebara is president and CEO of Tuangru, a next-generation data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software provider. He previously served as senior vice president of finance and administration at Peer 1 Hosting (now Cogeco Peer 1), a hosting service provider where he was responsible for finance, supply chain, and IT.
Tuangru’s next generation data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software is designed for today’s hybrid IT environments. Whether workloads reside on-prem, in edge data centers or in the cloud, Tuangru’s DCIM provides managers with a holistic view of their entire infrastructure for management and optimization. The company was recently recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in North America by Deloitte Technology Fast 500™. Tuangru is also a contributor member of The Green Grid. For more information, please visit www.tuangru.com.