Maintaining business visibility – Making the most out of IT

Cloud technology has fundamentally transformed IT. What was once little more than a theory based on the ideal of more agile and cost effective technical deployment has now altered the face of business across the globe. Today it is possible to achieve what took days or weeks in mere minutes. The process of creating a service request through an IT desk has now been replaced with a user self-service model.

For all its positive attributes, this framework has made IT strategy increasingly difficult to pin down. Chief Information Officers who were once required to develop a roadmap that would ensure return on investment from costly on premise assets are now expected to take stock of numerous cloud provisioned platforms throughout the business.

Put simply, the ease with which employees within an enterprise can now implement new applications or services has convoluted IT visibility. A lack of consolidation combined with an enthusiasm for cloud services has resulted in unexpected complexity in many sectors.

This trend, known as shadow IT, is aggravating IT processes and tactics at a strategic level. Without a fully consolidated view of the applications and services that exist within a business environment, it is simply impossible for the modern CIO or CTO to charter a course forward towards greater efficiency and cost effectiveness.

Regrettably, ageing applications that were once able to offer IT visibility by capturing available systems and data and presenting it in a merged fashion are unable to function as effectively as they once did. ‘Blind spots’ created by virtualisation and cloud adoption is veiling services and applications that operate independently from the overall system and yet drain valuable resources.

In response many CIOs are searching for more intelligent platforms that are able to identify and track these iterations.

The Software-Defined Data Centre represents this ideal.

By intelligently consolidating abstract hardware and storage resources this framework is able to pool existing applications and portals into an aggregated capacity while automating them as needed to applications.

The process is uniquely simple at its heart. Software-Defined Data Centre applications consolidate all systems into a single platform supporting industry standard protocols for stability and integration with the network backbone and APIs for application and management tool Integration.

This is the next step in maintaining IT visibility at a strategic level. Any CIO facing the complexity challenges often associated with cloud and virtualisation should appreciate the ineffectiveness of legacy tools. It is now time to leap forward towards a more consolidated view of frameworks that would otherwise be left totally disparate.

With this in mind, Business Connexion has worked closely with EMC to develop a Software-Defined Data Centre solution that can be applied to any environment or vertical.