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Modernising an organisation's IT infrastructure

Kirsten Doyle
By Kirsten Doyle, ITWeb contributor.
Johannesburg, 28 Feb 2017

Although the mandate to modernise IT infrastructure is universal, there is a particular emphasis in the education, government, manufacturing, professional services and managed service provider markets. At the same time, there are myriad issues involved that present challenges to modernising initiatives.

So says Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing and corporate strategy officer at Reduxio, an enterprise storage company based in the US and Israel.

He says challenges include organisational inertia. "In general organisations resist change. It's human nature. IT professionals spend significant time learning how to operate and maintain systems. They develop specific processes and workflows. Even when there is frustration with existing infrastructure, or a realisation that technologies have emerged that are superior to existing capabilities, it's the devil they know versus uncertainty about future options and scenarios."

The central nervous system

He adds that in many ways, infrastructure is the 'central nervous system' of a business today as companies are increasingly digital. "It is quite difficult to change or replace infrastructure for an on-going business, because it is likely that it can negatively impact business operations."

In addition, he says many organisations' IT infrastructure is held back by legacy storage solutions - hampering efficiency, productivity and even security. "Businesses that are relying on snapshots and legacy storage systems, rather than modern and innovative storage systems may find themselves spending hours, if not days, recovering their data or restoring backup in the event of a failure or cybersecurity attack - costing businesses far more in the long run."

To overcome these challenges, Grandinetti says businesses need to realise that reluctance to change in today's business environment will lead to certain failure. "To paraphrase the great American Founding Father and innovator Benjamin Franklin, the only certainty is death, taxes and change. Great leaders and organisations know that you have to change before you have to. This is a corporate culture issue. "

An evolutionary strategy

He says that many companies, from retail giants, to small, local shops have been eliminated or significantly harmed by Amazon's relentless evolutionary strategy. "Only once this organisational culture is in place, can we be ready to think about operational and infrastructure issues in this context. Technology is celebrating at an unprecedented pace. Storage capacity is always inadequate because company data is growing exponentially - and will continue to accelerate even faster in the era of big data, the Internet of things, video, and suchlike."

According to Grandinetti, today, agility and rapid scalability are key to successful IT operations. This is particularly true in the storage domain, where IT professionals race to keep up with their increasingly demanding storage requirements.

"There is no question, continuously update, or fail, is the new mantra," he says, adding that there are technologies available that do not require any replacement of existing infrastructure.

"Some can easily be brought into existing infrastructure to provide additional capacity as required for new use cases such as DevOps environment recovery which is a rapidly growing trend for many companies that have realised the importance of developing software internally to achieve unique competitive advantage."

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