Challenges of IT Infrastructure Transformation in the Industry

Looking at the overall IT Transformation in the industry, what should CIOs and CTOs do if the existing technologies may not support their Business Objectives optimally? How can CIO organization identify which emerging technologies may actually be useful in reaching those goals? There are many such questions, and IT transformation is not only limited to technology platforms. The transformation spans over major domains like People, Process and Organization. IT Transformation is a continuous journey and technology can accelerate it.
Here is the ‘HOW’ factor…
• How do I create my IT Infrastructure Blueprint for next 3-5 years?
IT is shifting its gears from technology gatekeeper to technology enabler; it is a must to create the Blueprint of IT infrastructure for next 3-5 years to have more visibility and aligning technology with business objectives. IT must shift into the role of technology enabler. Making this shift may not be simple. It not only requires a mindset shift, but it also requires an organizational shift.
• How do I enable my IT to handle ‘Infrastructure as code’ by implementing innovations across different layers of IT infrastructure leveraging automation and orchestration techniques?
It is imperative to design comprehensive and holistic approach to build, orchestrate, manage and report on intelligent workflows that work with third-party tools and operational processes. In the traditional approach to networking, most network functionality is implemented in a dedicated appliance; i.e., switch, router, application delivery controller. In addition, within the dedicated appliance, most of the functionality is implemented in dedicated hardware. Networking organizations are under increasing pressure to be more efficient and agile to cater business demands which are dynamic in nature.
By automating and orchestrating IT infrastructure would provide a dynamic environment in allocating, moving, replicating your virtual resources. It would help reducing administrative overheads of configuration and provisioning of functionality such as QoS and security. You can deploy your Applications in minutes and improve your application performance remarkably.
• How would I improve my IT performance by reducing cost by implementing Technology Innovations?
Technology innovation is the process through which new (or improved) technologies and / or processes are developed and brought into widespread use. There is an ample scope for IT to implement innovations as they are holding big data, IT processes and technology platforms. There is a need to bring innovation culture & climate in which employees can focus on outcomes instead of getting caught in the mundane activity trap. Usually, the performance engine is focused on financial, customer and market share performance. Instead, innovation planning process needs to focus on learning, viewing, automation, integration and innovation as a disciplined process. IT team can certainly bring the innovation culture within your organization by deploying technology and process innovations to improve performance, productivity and reduce IT costs.
• How can I perform the detail Gap Analysis of my current IT infrastructure to achieve my Business goals?
Gap Analysis is the comparison of actual performance with potential performance. If an organization does not make the best use of current resources or foregoes investment in capital technology, it may perform below its potential. There is a huge potential in IT infrastructure domain to perform better by improving processes and by using newer technology platforms and processes. For any organization, it is necessary to have the clear technology roadmap by assessing your existing IT infrastructure aligning with your business objectives.
• How do I design the strategy of performance management to address new workforce dynamics? How do I up-skill my IT team from L1 to L3? How do I advance the troubleshooting skills of my IT team?
Continuous education is considered as strategic. The up-skilling of IT administration and support teams is one of the biggest challenges faced by CIOs and CTOs of the organizations in the industry today. The faster adaptability of the hyper-converged IT infrastructure, migration to public cloud environments demand IT resources to get up-skill themselves very quickly to address these requirements. There is a need to build the platform that provides hands-on lab environment for internal training for employee skill improvement and new hire orientation programs. In the industry, there are IT teams who still work in silos supporting compute, storage, networking and security domains. By looking at the cloud adoption, orchestrating and automating day-to-day operations and support is a must. It is imperative for IT administrators to enhance their troubleshooting techniques across the IT infrastructure domains. In addition, innovative methods for hiring the right skills and effective performance management continuous to be the big challenges in IT industry even today.
• How do I ensure Business Continuity and Recovery via Proven Methodologies
Disasters are inevitable but mostly unpredictable, and they vary in type and magnitude. For an enterprise, a disaster means abrupt disruption of all or part of its business operations, which may directly result in revenue loss. In such urgency, a disaster recovery plan does not stop at defining the resources or processes that need to be in place to recover from a disaster. The plan should also define how to restore operations to a normal state once the disaster’s effects are mitigated. Implementing robust data classification and process management framework and related tools are believed to be the key success factor for data recovery. It is now possible to have continuous, invisible backup that protects data even from the end clients. Additionally, the self-service restore mechanism saves time for IT and end users during the disaster scenarios. With an adequate focus on these facts, IT need to conceive and configure an Enterprise architecture that provides the flexibility, adaptability, scalability and reliability needed to support a growing business through the IT Infrastructure Blue Print Service. One of the key challenges we observed in the industry while addressing Business Continuity is the non-availability of technical documentation like High-Level Designs, Low-Level Designs, Runbooks, SOPs, implementation procedures, etc. This leads to many challenges like delay in executing tasks during disaster recovery, un-appropriate capacity management, configuration management, up-skilling of internal resources and so on.
In addition to above key challenges while transforming IT infrastructure, some of the organizations are still facing challenges in deriving a strategy for data security and protection, data lifecycle management, software defined infrastructure, adopting open source technologies, cloud architecture and migration and so on.
About Sandeep Tidke
Co-Founder and Director
CredenceOne Associates Private Limited
Sandeep having 25+ years of experience in IT Infrastructure Management & Services played Global Lead roles in MNCs and fastest growing IT/ITES companies. Sandeep has a rich experience in IT transformation, Strategy & Governance, Technology Innovations, IT budgeting and cost reduction initiatives, Automation and overall IT efficiency and productivity improvement initiatives representing CIO Organization. Sandeep has deep expertise working with global companies to conceive and configure an enterprise architecture that provides the flexibility, adaptability, scalability and reliability needed to support a growing business. Sandeep brings his business and technological expertise to analyze organization’s IT infrastructure, align it with business to achieve business and technology objectives.
Before floating CredenceOne, his own IT transformation consulting firm, he was associated with IT majors like Cognizant (Global Head – Networking and Systems Support), Mahindra Network Services (Head of Network Operations), Datapro handling key strategic roles.
Sandeep has completed his graduation in Computer Science from the University of Pune along with his Masters in Computers and Business Management.

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