A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives: a curated forum reserved for leaders nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the Construction Tech Review Advisory Board.
IO
Transforming IT to Drive More Business Value
A top priority for IO is to improve product performance for our customers via data-driven research and development, with a goal to help them squeeze inefficiencies out of their IT value chain. We developed IO.Insight, which leverages Hadoop and Apache Cassandra, to provide predictive analytics capabilities to optimize data center energy use and utilization.
IO colocation and cloud services leverage data center hardware and software platform that provides the most information-rich data for creating fundamental insight into the way data centers are used and how the systems operate. IO.Insight provides data mining and visualization, predictive modeling and simulation to generate superior data center performance, as demonstrated by lower costs, greater uptime, and increased insight.
We live in a software-defined era. The value of the data center going forward will be driven by software. We see the data center as an ideal place to fundamentally, comprehensively and enduringly address today’s IT and sustainability challenges. IO.Insight demonstrates our commitment to finding innovative ways to intelligently manage data centers to drive more efficient usage and operations.
The Bottle Necks Encountered in IT
The CIOs we meet are challenged by IT staffing issues. Many CIOs operate in an environment where IT budgets are flat or declining which often means their staff remains static or are smaller in size. But, the demands on IT are mounting with the endless growth of data, the rise of mobile and cloud computing, increasing network complexity and more.
CIOs are challenged on how well they can align their IT staff to the areas where they can deliver the highest value to their business. It is becoming increasingly apparent for them to refocus their teams away from infrastructure to business application areas. This is driving organizations to search for data center infrastructure partners which they can trust to meet enterprise-grade requirements for greater availability, lower latency, increased security and improved efficiency to free more internal resources to address applications.
Enterprise cloud strategies are about evolution not revolution
The Focal Point for Vendors
To deliver the right solutions, technology vendors need to focus on Everything as a Service (XaaS). The model for service delivery that CIOs are turning to, today, include Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and more.
This approach helps IT departments to deliver greater value to the business by being able to devote more IT resources to applications. XaaS enables IT to outsource to the cloud and with this move, IT staff can evolve their skillsets. We will see enterprise IT professionals place less emphasis on the “nuts and bolts” of IT and also see more concentration of IT resources on business applications and business processes.
For enterprises, the move to the cloud requires more than a technology change to XaaS. For many CIOs, most of their budgets are capital-intensive and not focused on operational expenditures. Switching to a cloud model can impact balance sheets. CIOs need to partner with their CFOs to manage the implications of this changing approach.
The Transition Trajectory
Two of the tech trends that are having a significant impact on the enterprise are mobile and cloud computing. With the rise of mobile, people now expect all IT services and applications will be available 24/7 on any device they want. This has increased pressure on IT to extend support from desktops to corporate mobile devices and also to all mobile devices in the enterprises that have BYOD policies.
This easy access to applications and data through mobility has contributed to an environment where IT downtime is not tolerated. Many businesses shut down when their Internet service shuts down. IT faces pressure to keep systems and applications always on, making it essential that their data center infrastructure is reliable and available.
The second trend is the cloud. Most CIOs are likely to answer a question from their CEO on “What’s my cloud strategy?” in the last few years. For CIOs at companies with legacy applications, such as ERP running core financials, the top issue in moving to the cloud is managing risk.
In many instances, enterprise cloud strategies are about evolution not revolution. This means a hybrid cloud approach that combines public and private cloud deployments. The private cloud supports legacy applications while the public cloud can be the platform for new applications. This approach allows IT to gain a skillset in managing clouds be ready and move legacy applications for public clouds with minimal risk.
The Consulting Customs for Vendors
Tech vendors should eliminate the need for on-premise installations for business applications. The on-premise data center makes no sense for most businesses.
