centre of attention
TAILORING INFRASTRUCTURE FOR
THE NEXT INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Martin Brown, senior director, UK, Dell EMC Commercial, examines the sectors that artificial intelligence
and machine learning will impact and how back end infrastructure will need to be tailored to support this.
R
espondents to Dell
Technologies’ 2016 Digital
Transformation Index
study reflected on how
the speed of change is
transforming the entire ecosystem
of production and management.
This discussion around
digital transformation has been
running for some time, yet many
organisations are still struggling
to manage the complexity of their
legacy infrastructure and deliver
against the vision of becoming a
software driven enterprise. This
makes it difficult for CIOs to deliver
an environment where agile new
applications can be developed
to make the most of the latest
opportunities that technologies
16 | April 2017
like artificial intelligence (AI) and
virtual and augmented reality
afford. After all, if it takes you
weeks or months to allocate
infrastructure resources to a
development team, the IT function
can hardly respond to business
needs in a timely manner.
Why is legacy such a problem?
Well, operationally it consumes
time and resources. Anyone
leading an infrastructure team
will tell you their people spend
up to 80 per cent of their time on
maintenance; patching, migration,
troubleshooting, dealing with
resourcing bottlenecks and so on.
Second, the nature of the legacy
applications (often monolithic,
traditional applications) is
inherently complex. Even doing
something as superficially
straightforward as moving an
application off a ‘full’ resource
can take weeks or months.
Finally, even if an organisation has
managed to automate and deliver
a more efficient way of working
with legacy, it needs to adapt
its processes and infrastructure
for deploying resources to the
teams building the next wave of
applications for the business.
A new threat:
Digital start-ups test
the boundaries
For large enterprises, the greatest
challenge is in delivering these
new, agile services competing