Introduction
IT’s role in business has changed. IT organizations were traditionally once viewed as cost centers, but they are now perceived as true revenue creators. In turn, that change has fundamentally shifted IT’s priorities in regard to infrastructure design and architecture. As these organizations try to adjust their priorities, however, they sometimes underestimate how quickly their environments could become disaggregated across multiple sites, including various data centers and public cloud providers.
Adoption of public cloud services has risen fast. But often, all that the business requires from IT can’t be accomplished simply by using public cloud services. The scale of today’s digital demands-the increase in business-related needs- surpasses what IT can accomplish in any one location. Distributed operations across public cloud services and private data centers will continue to be the essential mode of operations for the foreseeable future. For example, data security and corporate governance concerns alone will dictate that some data/workloads must remain on-premises no matter what. This is why businesses must improve their agility and operational efficiency across their entire IT infrastructure, including within the data center. A need exists for more automation, as well as for more adaptable software architectures on- premises and seamless integration with the cloud. There are simply not enough people and budget money to accelerate operations with traditional systems alone.
In addition, all of those traditional allocations of personnel and budget come with significant opportunity costs, stealing resources away from what should instead be allocated to pursuing digital initiatives to boost revenue and improve operational efficiency.