As the mobile cloud era escalates, so do businesses’ expectations of IT, expecting applications to work without a hitch anywhere, on any device and with complete security, putting a huge amount of pressure on IT departments.
Speaking at a recent VMware User Group (VMUG) meeting at Tarsus Cloud on Demand, Joe Baguley, CTO of VMware EMEA, explored the concept of what software-defined means.
He encouraged attendees to consider how they plan to prepare their businesses to transform in the face of what is rapidly evolving as a software-defined future.
The future of IT is software-defined, Baguley emphasised, adding that IT can no longer be invisible and needs to take part in the application and deployment of business ideas.
An application focused IT function goes through a simple cycle of deploying an app, analyzing the data associated with that app and its usage and then updates the app, but IT’s role is to ensure that through this cycle, the application stays current for business.
“The reality is while we are still thinking about applying this in our businesses virtual giants like Facebook, Google & eBay etc. go around this cycle multiple times a day,” Baguley said.
“Traditional IT is on the other hand being weighed down by things like existing procedures, vendor driven upgrade cycles and rigid and formalised “industry standard” processes, resulting in the completion of one cycle about once every four years and taking several months to do it.”
This process within IT needs to speed up drastically in the software-defined era.
Customers must start to look for a self-service infrastructure that conforms to enterprise requirements and allows the consumer of the infrastructure to focus on apps, not servers.
The gaps between IT and developers need to be narrowed to place IT in a better position to manage and secure systems and networks through the addition of emerging new technologies.
VMware believes you need to bridge these divides by combining them and managing them from a single, hybrid cloud.
A hybrid cloud that delivers you a single environment from which to build, run and manage any application across multiple datacenters and providers – even viewing an entire datacenter or even multiple datacenters as one machine.
“It’s a complete new model for IT service delivery, it’s a model that encourages a form of Brave New IT and it is a model that is instant, fluid and secure,” Baguley said.
“In essence it is a way of doing things that is optimised for the development and delivery of all applications, which means both traditional, client-server applications as well as modern, cloud-native apps, to be consumed on any device…safely and securely.
“The new era of IT is not about knowing what you should do, but most importantly acting on what you can do when the timing is right,” Baguley concludes.
