Written by Piyush Saxena, AVP & Head, Next Gen Datacenter Practice, HCL
Over the past 12-18 months, we have seen enterprise IT leaders turning to Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) to enable a resilient and scalable IT architecture that can keep pace with digital initiatives at the business level. SDI is fast becoming a required necessity for enterprises that are not just grappling with customer-centric digital requirements, but executing enterprise-wide transformations that are fundamentally shifting the foundation of IT from “run IT” to “change IT.” To ensure IT infrastructure is keeping pace, what is needed is a highly-configurable and programmable infrastructure that delivers policy driven automation, agile operations and proper service orientation—all while enhancing the customer experience—which is where SDI uniquely steps up to the challenge.
Based my experience enabling SDI for global clients as head of HCL’s Next Gen Datacenter Practice, here are three ways you can power digital transformation through SDI:
- Integrate Infrastructure Architecture
Creating the best modern data center requires standardization and integration across cloud and on-premise architecture. While this is a daunting task, one way IT leaders are approaching the task is by essentially imitating characteristics of public cloud in their on-prem infrastructure in order to maintain agility and scalability while optimizing workloads and managing legacy environments. By leveraging automation as the efficiency driver, enterprises are deploying “cloud enabled” on-prem infrastructure that is highly scalable (even for IaaS and PaaS components), while also reducing manual intervention along the way.
- Align People, Process and Technology
SDI is a cultural shift as much as a technical shift, which means an in-depth understanding of the underlying people and process is a necessity. This is especially evident when IT tasks are automated, altering the previously-defined process for employees. Understanding the processes, changes must be understood in detail which requires new skill sets and a shift in culture for people to work together with infrastructure. That infrastructure is also going through a modernization exercise, and must be aligned to the people and processes which support this modernization.
- Follow a certified blueprint based approach
The steps above are extremely difficult, and could endanger the enterprise if not done correctly. One of the ways we help our clients reduce risk is by guiding them through a certified blueprint based framework, which we call VelocITy. As the name suggests, the framework quickly and thoroughly streamlines SDI adoption, minimizes implementation challenges and risks and reduces time-to-market to deliver optimal ROI for the enterprise. The VelocITy framework itself also follows a phased approach, ensuring that skillsets are assessed, architectures are planned and the migration, deployment and operations are executed with confidence.
To learn more about this phased approach and to adopt SDI with confidence, register for my September 27th webinar with VMware, where I will cover these steps in greater detail.