With the advent and realisation of virtualisation and cloud computing, businesses are struggling to manage their older legacy systems.
So said Chris Norton, regional director for southern Africa at VMware, speaking during the VMware Forum, in Midrand, last week. According to Norton, the traditional approach to IT is coming to an end.
“We are in the middle of the next wave of IT and if we aren't prepared to grab it and drive our business towards it, we will be unable to take advantage of the economic, productivity and business benefits associated with it,” Norton said.
“The traditional approach to IT is broken across the board, from infrastructure to applications and workplace enablement. The bottom line is that we need to act fast before we lose control of it entirely,” he added.
He also pointed out that, due to the explosion of new types of devices and the easy access to tools and applications in the cloud, IT risks losing control. Therefore, he explained that if business continues on its current approach to IT, it will not keep up with demand, resulting in loss of mind and market share among users, customers and suppliers.
data with, they are simply using them,” added Norton.
“It is the role of businesses to embrace this and not fight against it, but rather start providing access to information in the cloud, in the way users want, in keeping with business best practice.”
He is also of the view that cloud computing is not a fad technology or an ethereal application one can buy off the shelf and implement. Cloud computing is rather an infrastructure-based technology roadmap that marks the next generation of technology infrastructure, he explained.
According to Norton, VMware identifies that cloud is undoubtedly a disruptive environment, attacking what many perceive IT to be and how it should behave.
“IT must naturally take a considered approach to the post-PC era, but they must approach it. There are three areas where it must be addressed, and these are the transformation of the end-user computing layer, the application layer and the infrastructure layer,” states Norton.
“Where the old wave of computing was based on automation through scripting, we believe that the new, post-PC era is being driven by automation through policies. If you can provide the technologies for users to access data within the cloud, you can own the experience and manage the behaviour, as they are directed through a policy-based framework prescribed by you,” Norton concluded.
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