Written By: Srinivas Rao, Senior Director, System Engineering, Dell Technologies, India
The pandemic has played a central role in revolutionising everything virtually – from the way we do business, to the way we interact on a personal level. At the core of this transformation is technology; which has empowered businesses to innovate, adapt, and grow constantly in this ever-changing market dynamics.
In India, significant strides are underway in making certain key industries more and more user friendly. This revolves around the broader question regarding IT’s infrastructural complexity. Be it the increasing use of QR codes transforming the restaurant industry or the surge in telehealth services on the medical front, one thing is clear, a lot is contingent on how the IT infrastructure is managed.
Hence, Businesses are increasingly taking an “everything-as-a-service” approach to IT. The benefits of an as-a-Service model are clear: increased IT team agility, simplified digital transformation, and decreased low-value IT work.
In fact, IDC predicts that by 2024, more than 75% of infrastructure and applications, and more than half of data center infrastructure will be consumed as-a-service. Thus, striking the right balance of CapEx and OpEx to run an agile business.
In today’s cloud computing era, there are numerous reasons to take an as-a-service approach in any organization’s modernization efforts.
- Driving Innovation by Conscious Capital Spending
Organizations have had to realign budgets rapidly and dramatically since the pandemic began, with many needing to cut overall spending. The provision of employing IT on ‘as needed’ basis through ‘as a service’ model enables the business to track different initiatives and their performance levels. As a result, businesses can work on better allocation of funds, by gauging the overall needs and investing in assets accordingly.
For example, a technology business investing in AI will experience major benefits. With many projects in the pipeline, funding is a challenge without visibility into which are performing successfully. If the CapEx for the projects weren’t approved during the annual budget planning timeframe, they must go through an approval process with the CFO. This process is often slow and painful with uncertain results. With an as-a-service model, the business can easily approve spending for successful projects without making a case for a large capital expenditure. - Honing the Data access on the Edge
Edge deployments are becoming increasingly widespread, from digital healthcare in hospitals to smart manufacturing. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 75% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed at the edge – outside of a traditional, centralized data center or cloud.Here, an as-a-Service approach helps remove limitations from edge deployments. Businesses can put their infrastructure where they get the most value from, and utilize only the resources they need. This will additionally help them to secure value from data accessed outside of their data centers.
To understand this, take the example of a railroad company. Regular maintenance is key to ensuring the smooth functioning of trains. If one train is delayed for maintenance, it will almost certainly hinder the operations of other trains, inevitably reducing profitability. The influence of maintenance on delivery times, customer happiness, and prices is substantial.
Moving to an as-a-service model, a railroad company can to build trackside edge locations that visually inspect train cars in real time as they pass by monitoring stations along the tracks. As a result, they reduced 16 hours of inspection time to eight minutes without the train needing to stop.
- Easing Variable Workload Pressure via Pay-for-use Resources
It’s common for businesses to have workload variability. For example, some workloads will follow a daily work schedule like virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), HR systems and identity access and management systems, which are most utilized during employee working hours.
Another variable workload is cyclical utilization, where systems recognize trends around weekly, monthly or yearly cycles. In both cases, average utilization is often well below ideal. Adopting an as-a-service model and paying only for the resources takes the guesswork out of planning and the risk of being wrong. - IT Agility: Core of Businesses Transformation
IT teams are no strangers to the “do more with less” game. It can be painful for teams who spend precious resources only to keep systems up and running. Managed services help IT free up resources to innovate and work on new projects that benefit customers, like improving SLAs and increasing SLOs. With infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), IT can minimize environmental impact, meaning that IT teams don’t have to deal with decommissioning old hardware as the service provider owns the hardware.The two-fold incentive of employing a software-as-a-service model is to deliver business outcomes on one end and provide utility to customers on the other. The sheer clarity achieved by using these services makes scaling teams easier, as the IT team has the power to map computer resources to different projects.
I believe that it’s safe to say that the as-a-Service model is the future of any successful business. As IaaS becomes the next big thing, we will see how business strategies and decisions are made and how organizations find newer ways to innovate.
