Is Your IT Infrastructure Built for Tomorrow?
In this article
With IT infrastructure being the critical foundation of business operations, the ever-changing landscape of hardware and software lifecycles is challenging IT leaders to future-proof their technology investments.
But why future-proof your IT infrastructure? Because the risk of not doing so is too significant and may lead to:
- Missed opportunities for growth and innovation;
- A lack of scalability, performance and security;
- An inability to support emerging technologies;
- Inefficient operations; and
- Increased costs and technical debt.
While the future business needs of the organization may be hard to predict, IT leaders at least know their strategies must enable their infrastructure to quickly deploy applications and workloads, adapt to market changes, and increase resource efficiencies, all while securing the organization's data.
To best position their organizations for tomorrow, IT leaders and engineers in the data center should keep these five principles in mind as they determine their infrastructure investments.
Control your IT destiny
Although it makes sense to migrate some workloads to the public cloud, there are many reasons that specific data and workloads should remain in private environments. Because when infrastructure is in your hands, it's your decision, your data and your IT destiny.
By maintaining control of your IT infrastructure, you can achieve complete visibility of your data, increased reliability, availability and serviceability of mission-critical workloads, and the confidence of knowing who is responsible for your data and processes.
This control also gives engineers more flexibility to update, modify and maintain software and hardware to meet specific business needs and requirements.
Secure your data against cyberattacks
Conversations about control almost always include questions about cybersecurity. The more control you have over your data, the more security responsibilities you'll need to take on.
A solid security strategy is essential to avoiding disruption to your business and customers. And with bad actors getting more creative with cyberattacks, it's no longer a question of if but when your organization's data gets compromised. When you directly control your IT infrastructure and limit access points to data, you can better prepare, protect and recover from attacks.
Secondly, infrastructure decisions must consider compliance and regulatory requirements based on country or local governing laws and industry standards. Such requirements regulate how data must be stored and handled to protect consumers' data and privacy.
Adapt and scale to business needs and market changes
Cloud is no doubt influencing infrastructure decisions. And as data creation continues to grow at an unprecedented speed, so will the market's demand for more storage and performance. IT leaders know that to respond to evolving business needs and market changes, their IT infrastructure must have the ability to adapt and scale.
With as-a-service platforms and software-centric infrastructures, the cloud experience can be delivered in a private environment to provide flexibility, scalability and agility, all without the complexities often associated with the public cloud. These offerings enable decisions to be based on usage and application needs, giving the organization a better idea of business demands to scale and customize on demand. It also simplifies the management of hardware refreshes as it provides organizations access to the latest technologies without high upfront capital expenses.
Case study: Find out how Elanco Animal Health and WWT collaborated to design, build and integrate an end-to-end IT infrastructure that can scale and meet the evolving demands of the highly competitive animal health market.
Increase efficiency within your infrastructure
Rather than sticking to the parameters of your infrastructure and being confined by legacy hardware and outdated practices, you can now make infrastructure work for you.
Storage, compute and networking have been the foundation of a modern IT infrastructure. Now with processes like virtualization, containerization and automation, organizations can enable resource efficiency to maximize performance and capacity and provide cost and time savings without sacrificing security and reliability.
For organizations that support high-performance applications and workloads but need the ability to react to changes, composable disaggregated infrastructure and open technologies can enable IT teams to quickly assemble and reassemble infrastructure, which can improve supply chain posture and reduce infrastructure footprint.
Additionally, increasing efficiency within your IT infrastructure can help reduce the technical debt caused by unnecessary servers or applications that may consume more energy and power than needed. This leads us to our last principle.
Leverage IT to create a sustainable future
Sustainability is emerging as a priority for organizations of all sizes. And because data centers are known for consuming massive amounts of energy and power, they're an easy target for IT leaders to focus on sustainable technologies and best practices.
Through new energy-saving technologies in areas such as cooling, high-density servers and racks, and AI and analytics, the journey to establishing a more efficient, sustainable data center footprint while delivering value across your entire organization is possible.
To learn more about making sustainability part of your overall IT plan and determining the right steps to get started, we recommend reading this report: WWT Research Report: Corporate Sustainability Priorities for 2023.
How to get started
Our technology and industry experts, advanced testing capabilities, supply chain and integration expertise, and comprehensive partner ecosystem allow us to help organizations navigate the complexities of building and deploying a modern infrastructure — one that enables organizations to respond to whatever tomorrow brings.