INTELLIGENT DATA CENTRES
The organisations that will achieve
digital supremacy in 2018 will be
those that capitalise on new tools
that enable their developers to
innovate and create new sources of
competitive differentiation.
Kevin Leahy, Group SVP, Data Centre Business
Unit, Dimension Data.
development and deployment tools,
particularly in the area of containerisation.
These advancements have a significant
impact on application portability and
interoperability. Now developers can
use containers to develop applications
and move them into production across
all the environments that make up their
hybrid infrastructures. Increasingly,
we will see organisations that are
successfully accelerating their digital
transformation focusing on using SaaS
for non-differentiating processes. Using
SaaS to ensure that their non-core focus
areas are running optimally will enable
organisations to focus their resources on
creating and evolving their differentiation
capability elsewhere.
Rise of the API
Increasingly, organisations are recognising
the importance of APIs in enabling them to
develop revenue-generating applications
and services. This evolution has been
dubbed the rise of the API economy. In
2018, organisations will start to see the
wisdom in standardising on a set of APIs.
We will see IT decision-makers move
away from evaluating tools, technologies
and services purely on the basis of their
features and the capabilities they enable.
Now, the first questions they will ask will
be: Tell me about the APIs?
In the year ahead, businesses will be
challenged to keep up with the pace of
change of APIs and ensure that they are
able to invest in programming around
them, to drive the business outcomes that
they are looking for.
The type and number of APIs that
organisations select will depend on
several factors, including the extent to
which they want or need to abstract away
the underlying technologies. The cloud
management tool will seamlessly abstract
away all the underlying clouds and you can
just interface with the tool’s API, not those
of the individual clouds.
Services architecture
There is a clear acceptance in the industry
that hybrid IT is the model of the future.
But hybrid IT has significant architectural
implications, which organisations will
need to address in the year ahead. Over
the last decade, IT teams have focused
much of their energies on technology
integration and, during this period, there
was a strong drive towards standardisation
of technologies to make this more
achievable. The advent of hybrid IT has
changed the paradigm: mastering hybrid
IT requires you to focus not on technology
integration but on services integration.
Most organisational architectures were not
built with this theme in mind.
If you attempt to bring together the
different services components without
first putting in place the appropriate
architecture, you run the risk of delivering
a poor, inconsistent user experience.
And as the services start to become more
complex, your ability to scale them and
deliver with quality will be limited.
Value of data
In 2018, there will be an intensified focus
on exploiting the value of data and ensuring
it is made available to those who need it,
when they need it, a truly data-centric view
of IT. Historically, IT teams focused on
managing the cost of an organisation’s data.
They would move data from one tier of
storage to another. As the value or the need
to access certain sets of data diminished,
they would be progressively moved to lower
cost storage tiers.
Today, there are two forces driving a
shift in focus from cost, to value. First,
the advent of all-flash storage means that
there is less need for organisations to
concern themselves with different storage
types and tiers. In addition, you can
architect such that cost is not an issue, by
moving to an all-flash option to make your
business faster.
What is more important is the fact that
as organisations transform into digital
business, the role of data is taking on
greater significance. Now, the emphasis
is on finding new value in your data and
being able to leverage the value of that
data faster. This raises questions about
where the data needs to be in order to
extract that value, and what kind of
analytics you need to perform.
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