Johannesburg, 24 Jun 2019
Digital transformation is driving rapid and significant changes across every industry, and businesses are having to change their operating models accordingly. However, it’s not just the business that needs to change to support this transformation, IT has to transform as well.
“The very way business is being done is changing too,” says Jarred Somiah, VMware product manager at Axiz, SA’s leading value-added ICT distributor. “Organisations are under increasing pressure to engage more effectively with their customers, and offer better, more personal experiences. Concurrently, the pace of business is quickening, and companies are looking for more efficient ways to bring services and products to the market quickly.”
He says to do this, they need a modern data centre that offers all the scalability, agility, flexibility and security to promote growth and enable innovation. “This requires an integrated approach. Today’s organisations are spoiled for choice. Do they build a new data centre? Modernise an old one? Look to the cloud or co-location? Or should they consider a mixture of these? Many businesses are encumbered with old, legacy environments, or ones that are designed on complex architectures.”
And, Somiah says, legacy environments simply cannot offer the flexibility and agility that modern businesses need to grow and transform. “To reduce complexity and increase agility, IT departments need an approach that allows them to rapidly deploy, manage and scale applications and infrastructures. Moreover, fixed budgets and other cost constraints make doing this impossible with legacy infrastructure, which requires specific skills that aren’t easy to find.”
This is why many organisations are opting for a hybrid environment, made up of public and private cloud, and on-premises environments. “Hybrid environments certainly deliver the flexibility and agility that legacy environments do not, but they go hand in hand with security and compliance risks, so IT must find a way to offer services securely across all their environments, and ensure 100% availability.”
What is needed is an agile, services-oriented IT model for data centres that connects applications across multiple clouds, on any device, and guarantees security, compliance, availability and consistency, and within a limited budget.
Somiah says the answer is VMware’s software-defined architectures that integrate compute, network and storage virtualisation technologies. By providing customers with automation and management, organisations can leverage software-defined models and solutions to modernise their infrastructure, automate the delivery and management of IT services, and run modern cloud-native and microservices-based applications to allow the business to perform at a new (digital-centric) level and drive innovation.
“VMware’s software-defined approach brings previously unseen levels of agility and economics in the data centre. This enables businesses to manage and run consistent infrastructure and operations across their data centres and public clouds and deliver applications with the speed and agility to support business innovation and growth,” he concludes.
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