By Shrikant Navelkar, Director – Oracle Relationships, at Clover Infotech
In a world crippled by COVID – 19, IT infrastructure modernization has become a key topic for discussion considering the plethora of benefits it offers to enterprises. Transforming IT infrastructure enables enterprises to create highly efficient, flexible and agile IT systems and processes. However, many organisations today still rely on a variety of outdated and inefficient technology to run their business. As per recent reports, 71% of IT organizations consider legacy infrastructure as their biggest barrier to digital transformation.
Making extensive changes to IT infrastructure is a challenging and complex process since poorly planned changes could result in significant revenue loss. The technology leaders must begin with optimizing the IT infrastructure footprint based on the number of components and its types as well as alignment with the overall business requirement.
It can be undertaken in the following steps:
- Assess the current IT infrastructure landscape – The first step to successful infrastructure modernization is to take into account an organization’s existing technology landscape. Which technology is serving the business well? Which isn’t? What needs to be modernized? Is there anything that may make sense to outsource? Technology leaders need to determine biggest IT pain points, needs and challenges. They need to align modernization planning with the organization’s goals and objectives.
- Create a Roadmap for Modernization – Once technology leaders have better understanding of the business goals for modernization, they need to create a technology roadmap that outlines the details of the modernization exercise.
- Design the New IT Infrastructure – Enterprises across the globe are incorporating containerization, virtualization and platform modernization in their IT landscape to reap the benefits of being a true digital-native enterprise. With Kubernetes, an open-source platform, the IT infrastructure teams can manage ad-hoc requests better by enabling containerization. The fluid and flexible containers can manage dynamic requests with efficient provisioning – both scaling up and scaling down of compute, storage, and network resources. Such an IT infrastructure equipped with operating systems such as Oracle Linux that come with containerization and orchestration capabilities enable organizations to derive great value and RoI from their infrastructure modernization efforts.
- Take the infrastructure to the cloud – The cloud enables modernization without the need to “rip and replace” on-premise systems. In many cases, enterprises can replicate and even enhance the functionality of a legacy system by subscribing to it as a service via the cloud.
- Ensuring Security – Data security cannot be undermined while planning an infrastructure modernization exercise. Legacy IT systems and processes are considered as hot-targets by hackers. There are instances where legacy applications can no longer be updated, giving hackers an opportunity to exploit. When IT infrastructure is modernized and migrated to the cloud, enterprises can be assured that higher standards of security are maintained by cloud service providers along with regular penetration testing for risk mitigation. With infrastructure modernization, organizations can enhance security while unleashing the power and benefits of serverless computing, digital-native applications, streaming analytics, and artificial intelligence in a highly cost-effective manner.
