No matter how up-to-date your datacenter may seem, there’s always room for improvement. Growing means consistently examining your existing infrastructure for weak spots and asking if what you have in place is not only meeting the demands of your business today, but also setting you up for success in the increasingly multi-cloud focused future.
If you’re ready for an infrastructure revamp, here are a few recommendations to help you along your journey.
Assess your Transformation Goals
Depending on the size of your business, your transformation goals will vary. For example, the Nutanix Public Cloud Usage report indicates that mid-size companies work well on the public cloud, making up the largest percentage of users. Smaller companies like startups, however, may prefer the public cloud initially, but they may struggle with governance and cost control.
Needless to say, your growth journey will differ from other businesses, and it may not be linear. To best assess your transformation goals, here are a few questions you can ask yourself:
- How can my IT infrastructure contribute to the success of my business?
- Can a more agile infrastructure reduce costs and improve my service delivery?
- How am I currently managing and monitoring my IT infrastructure? Can that be improved?
- What are the pain points I’m facing with my in-place infrastructure?
- What’s our ratio of day-to-day operations work to time spent on innovation?
Of course, assessing your goals is only the first step. With more businesses turning to cloud services, your next step is to consider your cloud architecture.
Analyze (or Rethink) Your Cloud Choice
Is there room to rethink your cloud architecture?
The 2018 State of the Enterprise Datacenter report shows that, of all cloud types, hybrid cloud meets the broadest spectrum of business requirements. Here are some of the key benefits a hybrid cloud delivers: Speedier time to market, a superior end-user application performance, and greater flexibility and scalability. In fact, for each of these benefits, around 50% of respondents say hybrid cloud meets their needs better than solely a private or public cloud.
In a similar camp, we have multi-cloud. Like its hybrid counterpart, it’s becoming a top choice for datacenters globally. Gartner even predicts that by the end of this year, 70% of enterprises will have adopted a multi-cloud strategy. The main difference lies in its data sharing—or lack thereof. Whereas a hybrid cloud blends a public and private cloud, a multi-cloud utilizes both but does not share data between either cloud.
The bottom line? There’s no reason to settle for only a private or public cloud. Learn more about the advantages of hybrid and multi-cloud here.
Less Lagging, More Automating
Even if you already have a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy in place, chances are you’re likely to run into (or already have run into) operating challenges. GigaOm cites 3 main struggles when it comes to these cloud environments: Complexity, low visibility, and increased management. All three of these can lead to unchecked costs, wasted time and resources, and more.
When it comes to minimizing complexity, the solution is simple: automation. GigaOm notes that for every dollar invested in automation, $100 will be returned over a 5-year period.
Beyond the financial component, automation eliminates the tedious, round-the-clock management so many IT teams face. With more free time, these teams can funnel their energy into more important, business-moving projects.
Make the Move to Hyperconverged Infrastructure
HCI is quickly gaining traction as a prime choice for businesses hoping to scale—no forklift required. In numbers, 27% of respondents from the State of the Enterprise Datacenter reportexpect greater operational efficiency from HCI, 26% expected reduced costs, and 24% expected greater scalability.
Traditional 3-tier infrastructure is far from future-ready. Its inherent complexity, silos, scaling issues, and tedious management prevents IT teams from being able to explore, invent, and innovate to the degree they’d like.
HCI is a turnkey alternative, combining x86-based server and storage resources with intelligent software. The separate storage networks and storage arrays of legacy infrastructure are not just complex; they impede the success of your business. If you’re familiar with using public cloud, HCI is in a similar ballpark in terms of scaling, letting you start small and scale as you need rather than predicting your growth on the spot.
While many companies are moving toward HCI, choosing a reliable vendor is key. To help businesses evaluate the top vendors in the space, the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure provides real-world considerations for implementing HCI, an evaluation of 12 vendors, and who leads the pack.
Set your Security Standards Higher
Let’s get right to it: 77% of organizations have been victims of at least one cybersecurity attack, and 73% of these attacks come from outsiders.
It’s no secret that cyberattacks are on the rise, having doubled since 2016, but too many organizations still face the harrowing threat of security breaches due to an under-equipped infrastructure and gaps in their security strategy.
When it comes to top-of-the-line security, it must start from the ground-up. In other words, security should be embedded as part of your infrastructure—not as a separate layer. Built-in, security-first infrastructure is better equipped to handle the rapid, sophisticated waves of cyber threats, self-correct with little-to-no manual intervention, and weave in security standards throughout the entire development lifecycle.
Conclusion
Your infrastructure can benefit from even just one of these considerations, but there’s one, all-encompassing way to experience them all.
Take Nutanix out for a free, 2-hour test drive today. You’ll get a firsthand look at what hyperconvergence can do for your IT operations, create storage containers and VMs on your own, and get a guided, step-by-step tour of the technology that powers thousands of global datacenters.
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