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Category: IT Administration

How to Leverage Elastic Services for Cost Optimization
Due to the current pandemic, business continuity for many organizations has suffered a great deal. Organizations, primarily those in manufacturing, agriculture, transport, hospitality, energy and retail sectors, have been affected by the unanticipated change in the business landscape. Some companies in these sectors have been experiencing massive losses in revenue, which is why their primary requirement at this point is cost reduction.

The other side of the crisis is that organizations in sectors such as medical, government and financial services, which are providing essential services, have experienced higher operational demands than usual–again leading to increased operational costs. Irrespective of the industry you belong to, and whether it is experiencing reduced or increased operations, cost optimization is a reality for you to ensure a sustained existence.

One of the most reliable measures for cost optimization at this stage is to leverage elastic services designed to grow or shrink according to demand, such as cloud and managed services. For example, a well-positioned organization with a cloud native architecture can scale up or scale down cloud consumption to mitigate lost operational demand. Organizations that employ managed services providers can repurpose full-time staff members from impacted business units or product lines to more strategic initiatives.

The Need for Cost Optimization: Now and Later

From observations of the economic impact of the crisis, many organizations have not been well positioned or in a state to leverage elastic services during the current crisis. In the absence of a flexible operational model, they are exposed to risks caused by:
- A sudden disruption in business continuity.
- Loss of business or revenues.
To ensure that they are ready, should another disaster strike, companies need to start planning now. Partnering with a seasoned managed services provider to plan and leverage the consumption and subscription services is advisable, so that they can immediately adjust expenditures that are no longer relevant and can prepare for long-term cost reduction to conserve cash.

Optimizing Costs with Elastic Services

One thing that the impact of the pandemic on businesses has made very clear is that investment toward IT strategy and planning services pays in good times, as well as bad times. Therefore, organizations, whether they are experiencing loss or profit at this stage, should consider long-term investment toward IT strategy and planning services, and thoroughly plan the “new normal” expenditures needed to scale demand/revenue.

Elastic cloud and managed services can help these organizations strike a balance between the rapid changes in the demand and need for expenditure.
- With consumption services, organizations can choose to pay only for the services and resources they use.
- With subscription services, organizations can choose flexible payment terms that often afford advantageous pricing the longer one commits. Choose the timeframe that balances the risk and reward.
- Since most enterprises will freeze hiring and try to avoid long-term or substantial capital investments at this stage, they can meet their operational demands by contracting managed services and re-platforming their applications to use cloud services.
The Three-Step Approach to Successfully Implementing Elastic Services

Given the requirements of each business are different, and the way they plan their expenditure varies as well, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy to ensure the successful implementation of elastic services for cost optimization. In order to ensure that elastic services help optimize costs in your organization in an efficient manner, you should follow the three-step approach described below:
1. Discover: First, collect all your operational revenue and expenses over a three-year period. Understand seasonality lows and highs (these are elastic needs). Perform a business-impact-analysis (B-I-A) to understand the critical business processes and then map them to risk scenarios that can cause business disruption. Capture and arrange the risks and then determine how to build a risk mitigation plan with your strategic IT leadership and advisors.
2. Analyze: Adapt your existing architecture to identify your business goals and how it has changed due to the new circumstances, and then perform a gap analysis and capabilities assessment.
3. Plan: Based on your business goals, revisit how and where it makes sense to use elastic services to fit seasonal fluctuation better, and risk scenarios where rapidly declining operational demand may occur.
Given the pace and scale of how the business landscape is changing, a traditional wait-and-watch response is not going to work in the long run. Engaging with a strategic leadership partner that can help you analyze your current infrastructure and implement elastic services is a smart move to meet your business objectives.
May 13, 2020
OpsRamp Offers Users Free IT Management Services

OpsRamp announced today that IT organizations that subscribe to its discovery and monitoring tools will now also receive free access to the company’s AIOps and remote access management service tiers for one year.

Ciaran Byrne, vice president of product for OpsRamp, said the decision to provide free access to additional tiers of service is a direct response to the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. IT teams are under pressure to reduce the total cost of ownership of IT at a time when they need remote access management capabilities more than ever, he said.

With so many IT teams now working from home—what may become the new normal—OpsRamp is looking to make it less expensive to transition to a cloud-based platform for managing IT operations, he added.

One of the byproducts of the pandemic, Byrne said, will be to accelerate the rate at which IT teams are automating processes. Many IT leaders are unsure how many members of the IT team they may be able to retain during a downturn. As such, many of them have already begun to aggressively automate many more processes as part of an effort to enable a potentially smaller IT team to remain effective, he said.

The challenge, of course, is that the IT environment itself is increasingly complex to manage. In fact, as IT teams look to deploy cloud-native platforms to make applications more flexible and resilient, the IT environment is likely to become even more complex. In fact, according to a recent OpsRamp survey, as of the start of the economic downturn, 69% of respondents expect their organization to invest more in AIOps.

It’s unclear to what degree the OpsRamp decision to make additional services available for free represents the start of a battle among SaaS IT management platform providers to gain market share. IT teams can expect that, given the current economic climate, these providers will be a lot more willing to negotiate terms and conditions.

Of course, the biggest inhibitor to adopting a SaaS-based platform to manage IT has been inertia within the IT organization. The rate at which organizations now determine whether to migrate to a SaaS-based platform for managing IT will have a significant impact on the degree to which IT vendors will be willing to negotiate. Of course, incumbent providers of IT management platforms deployed in on-premises IT environments are also likely to be more aggressive in response.

Not every IT organization will be able to make a fast transition to the cloud during the economic downturn. However, at a time when the pressure to transition to an opex versus capex financial model for IT increases, one of the easiest places to start making that transition is with the software employed to manage IT systems regardless of where they happen to be located.

May 12, 2020
VMware Makes vRealize Automation Framework Available via the Cloud

VMware this week announced it has made a software-as-a-service (SaaS) edition of its vRealize automation platform generally available.

Taruna Gandhi, senior director for product and technical marketing at VMware, said VMware vRealize Operation Cloud will make IT automation more accessible to a broader swath of organizations that might not be able to implement IT automation on their own.

The vRealize Operations Cloud service provides all the same capabilities as the on-premises edition of vRealize with the added benefit of being integrated with other VMware Cloud services, including VMware Cloud on AWS.

In general, Gandhi said VMware is seeing increased adoption of IT automation frameworks occurring in three phases. In the first phase, IT teams are automating internal processes primarily for their own benefit. In the second phase, IT operations teams set up self-service portals for developers. In the third phase, organizations embrace DevOps processes to provide developers with the equivalent of a cloud computing experience spanning both on-premises and public cloud computing resources.

Most existing VMware customers are still in the first or second phases, but over time Gandhi said VMware expects organizations to adopt DevOps practices as part of a more aggressive effort to reduce costs during the current economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic while accelerating the rate at which applications are deployed and updated.

The VMware vRealize Operations Cloud will play a significant role in accelerating that transition because it makes IT automation available as a service rather than a platform that needs to be deployed and maintained by an internal IT department. The beta test for vRealize Operations Cloud spanned dozens of customers that put more than 130,000 virtual machines under management across 120-plus vCenters and more than 10 VMware Cloud on AWS deployments, Gandhi said, noting the next phase will to see IT organizations begin to centralize the management of multiple cloud silos that have sprung up over the last several years within most organizations.

There are, of course, no shortage of options these days when it comes to IT automation frameworks. VMware is making a case for vRealize as a natural extension of the VMware management tools that many organizations employ to manage VMware virtual machines that are widely used across most enterprise IT environments. VMware is now extending the reach of those tools to enable IT teams to also manage containers and even rival virtual machine platforms, noted Gandhi.

Most of those IT organizations are now struggling to manage IT environments that have become more complex at a time when the pressure to employ higher levels of automation to rein in costs is rising sharply. It remains to be seen how IT organizations will respond to that imperative as pressure to either cap or reduce IT headcount continues to mount. Of course, not every sector of the economy is experiencing the same pressure. There are high-growth segments involving, for example, educational or entertainment services. Regardless of industry, however, it’s clear IT teams are being asked to do a lot more sooner with either the same or fewer resources.

— Mike Vizard

April 16, 2020
Intelligent Virtual Assistants and Their Role in Helping Brands Transform Customer Experiences

The relationship between computers and humans has undergone a significant paradigm shift over several decades. From the emergence of the web in 1995 to applications or apps in 2005, technology has grown by leaps and bounds as the years progressed. This growth has brought technology to the modern era, where artificial intelligence (AI) has ultimately begun to come of age.

Engineers and scientists have invested a great deal of effort, in terms of both energy and time, over the past few decades, which has allowed AI to be adapted into nearly every technological innovation in recent years. One such innovation is the intelligent virtual assistant (IVA).

An IVA is a conversational AI system that has the capability to emulate human interaction in order to carry out and optimize tasks—customer service, for example. Digital assistants are gaining widespread attention across the industrial landscape, owing to a plethora of technological advancements, including machine learning and deep neural networks, among others. What makes these virtual assistants intelligent is their ability to emulate three key elements that enable customer service agents to solve problems—learning, reasoning and understanding.

How did these conversational AI technologies achieve these capabilities? To answer this question, it is essential to delve into the evolution of the IVA market.

Evolution of IVAs

Although the terms “chatbots” and “intelligent virtual assistant” are often used interchangeably, and despite the fact that these technologies share a core commonality—i.e., their ability to facilitate consumer-enterprise interaction—these conversational AI technologies have some distinct differences. These differences lie mainly in complexity, scope and abilities, which IVAs’ possess more of than chatbots.

In simple words, IVAs are the result of a decade-long chatbot evolution.

Chatbots were first introduced in the late 60s and early 70s. These technologies were programmed with rudimentary capabilities, including scripted responses based on user inputs in the form of specific phrases and keywords.

However, with conversational flows becoming increasingly more complex over time, these chatbots began facing limitations in their scope, mainly owing to their lack of learning process and pre-programmed responses. With no memory or context retention capabilities, the bots were unable to comprehend relevant user information between sessions or even during the conversation.

However, conversational AI evolution reached a turning point with the emergence of two novel technologies, machine learning (ML) and natural language understanding (NLU).

NLU gives the digital assistant the ability to comprehend and interpret inputs from users in natural language, which can enable the bot to converse with a customer naturally, as a customer service agent would.

Meanwhile, ML allows the bots to self-train based on data such as previous customer service interaction transcripts or by observing live customer-agent interactions. This helps the IVAs to cater to customer needs in a more efficient and seamless manner.

The technological advantages provided by these technologies, therefore, facilitated the gradual evolution of simple chatbots into IVAs, which possess in-depth domain knowledge that they can leverage to understand customer preferences and intents, fulfill their needs and enhance performance over time by gaining new insights from each interaction.

As a result of these advanced capabilities, automation and customer satisfaction are assured outcomes of IVA adoption. Thus, brands that make use of this technology can make sure that they refocus on their primary objective: ROI.

The Gradual Shift of IVA Technology from a Personal to a Commercial Landscape

Starting out as an ideal solution for virtual personal assistants, such as Apple’s Siri which allows users to use voice-technology to perform myriad tasks like texting, scheduling meetings or making phone calls, IVAs are now gaining prominence as crucial tools for brands to implement effective customer engagement.

AI assistants are rapidly making their way out of personal applications and entering a more business-oriented landscape, for instance, Oracle’s Digital Assistant which is designed to be an ideal platform for sales, marketing and other industry verticals by interfacing with a vast software app portfolio.

IVA technology is used across a range of industrial applications, for example, taking up the role of sales agents or customer service executives, which makes it a scalable and appealing option for enterprises. Businesses predominantly adopt digital assistants to drive efficiency, enhance ROI, optimize processes and help reduce workloads.

As the industrial space grows increasingly more competitive, customer engagement has emerged as one of the most significant assets for a successful brand. In fact, studies have shown that almost 96% of customers across the globe believe that customer service is a significant factor contributing to their loyalty to a brand.

IVAs help brands deliver positive customer experiences by covering a number of different aspects. For instance, AI assistants can quickly solve customer problems through customers’ preferred channels, ensuring speed and convenience. They can also integrate with various systems and databases of brands, thus offering a robust knowledge base to provide tailored solutions to customers. Additionally, they are able to adapt their tone and language to context, which helps them emulate human conversations. All these factors help digital assistants play the role of an efficient and helpful customer service representative.

How Brands Are Leveraging Conversational AI Assistants to Drive Customer Engagement

Given the strong capacity of conversational AI technology to engage actively with customers and optimize customer service, more and more companies are adopting the technology as an integral part of their customer experience activities.

To illustrate, Volvo has plans to develop conversational assistance to guide drivers in the use of various in-car apps to deliver a more effortless connected car experience.

Likewise, Spotify has also earned positive reviews for its AI-based technology to track user patterns and make accurate recommendations and predictions based on preferences of individual customers, in turn elevating the overall user experience.

The IVA industry has witnessed several prolific advancements over the years. The future outlook for the technology seems positive, with even more exciting avenues as the years progress, and AI researchers investigating the prospect of enhancing the emotional intelligence of assistants. The ability to comprehend not just the user’s preferences but also their emotions would revolutionize the way customer service is delivered, thus positioning AI assistants as a pivotal component of the future customer experience landscape.

— Saloni Walimbe

April 15, 2020
BigPanda Provides Free 90-Day Access to IT Ops Platform

BigPanda, a provider of an IT ops platform infused with machine learning algorithms, this week announced it will make available for free for 90 days an instance of its software available to IT professionals working from home to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mohan Kompella, vice president of product marketing for BigPanda, said the IT Ops From Home program is intended to make it easier for IT teams to manage IT operations using a platform that was designed from the ground up to remotely manage highly distributed computing environments.

BigPanda is also providing free 90-day support along with free training via a virtual classroom. Organizations that opt to participate in the program are under no obligation to renew.

Kompella said the BigPanda platform is designed to correlate events in a way that automates IT incident management. It provides built-in integrations with software and services from Amazon Web Services (AWS), AppDynamics, Cloudwatch, Splunk, Azure, Jira and Slack.

It may take a little effort for IT organizations to implement a new platform for managing IT in the midst of a pandemic, he conceded, but also noted there are organizations that are finding their existing IT platforms are not designed to enable IT teams to support an entire workforce that is now accessing distributed applications from home. The BigPanda platform makes it possible to unify the management of all the silos that now make up an enterprise IT environment—in fact, Kompella said managing IT environments remotely may soon become the “new normal.” In much the same way many organizations now employ remote workers to provide customer service, Kompella noted it’s possible many IT support staff will now simply work from home. That approach would, among other things, reduce the cost of office space for IT personnel.

As organizations struggle to implement business continuity plans there’s no doubt many legacy IT operations platforms are being stretched to their limit. Many of the plans organizations had to slowly transition to a modern IT management platform now need to be accelerated, said Kompella.

There’s no doubt the COVID-10 pandemic will have a profound impact on the way IT is managed. Many processes will be forever altered, especially as organizations embrace DevOps processes to manage application workloads that are increasingly likely to be deployed in the cloud, as part of a concerted effort to make business processes more resilient in the face of global disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic. After all, no one is quite sure when the current crisis might subside or return. There may even additional pandemics to contend with in the future.

Whatever the motivation, an evolutionary approach to modernizing IT ops will be moving forward at a faster pace among organizations that have the wherewithal to stave off the current economic downturn caused by the pandemic. In fact, there may even be a high correlation between organizations that fail to modernize those processes and those organizations that don’t re-emerge stronger in 2021.

— Mike Vizard

April 10, 2020
Three Priorities for IT Operations Continuity During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The world has been turned upside down amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, and organizations that are trying to maintain best IT and security practices are faced with new challenges such as sudden remote workforces, increased COVID-19-related phishing and business e-mail compromise scams, and quarantine-imposed travel restrictions.

Are you facing disruptions in your workforce, limitations in the supply chain and up-ended disaster plans? You’re not alone. A recent survey, Critical Gaps in Business Continuity Plans: Exclusive Survey Results, reported that 62% of businesses surveyed have business continuity plans, but 48% said their plans only cover emergency operations for two to three weeks.

With increased limitations affecting enterprises, what are the top three things organizations must prioritize for optimal security and minimal outages to aim for business as usual?

Consider the Cloud

If you have been considering the cloud for your IT and information security infrastructure, now might be the right time to explore all your options and make strategic moves. Eighty-three percent of enterprise workloads will be in the cloud this year, according to a recent LogicMonitor cloud study, and security hardware and applications will be no exception to that trend. The cloud can increase your capacity and facilitate remote access to vital business functions, especially now when redundancy and scalability are more important than ever.

For example, the cloud could be a temporary solution for a retailer whose existing payment processing infrastructure is overloaded and declining transactions as a result. It doesn’t replace their existing on-premises environment, but it augments it by adding on-demand scalability. This could cover a temporary surge in demand or stand in during a full-blown outage. Do you know whether your existing applications have cloud-based extensibility?

Quite often, organizations aren’t aware of the cloud capabilities they can already utilize. During times of uncertainty, the cloud can be a good temporary approach and does not have to be a big expenditure. Organizations can pursue the cloud with a low commitment, month-to-month contract, and consider it more permanently at a later date.

When moving workloads to the cloud, considering security is of paramount importance. Many public cloud providers such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform offer functions to help secure these workloads and applications, and one gaining a great deal of attention is encryption key management. All major public cloud providers offer methods for their users to self-manage the keys used to encrypt, decrypt, digitally sign,and validate data. This technology is known as Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) and is a high assurance method for letting organizations retain control of their own cryptographic keys even after moving to the cloud.

Ensure Redundancy

System failures are not an option in mission-critical environments, and redundancy will offer up backup to increase the reliability of your systems. Given the current COVID-19 situation, do you have backup resources that can continue to process data without interruption? What if your data center is out of service altogether? Do you have another that can keep your infrastructure operational?

As an example, let’s look at cryptographic key management. Numerous business applications offload private key storage to purpose-built devices known as hardware security modules (HSM). HSMs are tamper-evident, tamper-responsive servers typically certified to rigorous requirements such as FIPS 140-2 Level 3. A typical information security infrastructure may only have throughput requirements to justify a single encryption HSM that is partitioned to provide services to multiple business applications. But if this single HSM fails or must be taken offline, any application relying on it for cryptographic key management may also become unavailable.

In this scenario, the ideal data security infrastructure would comprise multiple HSMs along with at least one centralized management server, split between multiple geographically separated data centers. This example can be extended out to virtually any other type of IT hardware, but it is particularly important for resources representing a single point of failure, where their outage would have cascading impacts throughout your enterprise ecosystem.

To mitigate these risks, talk to your vendors about data security and redundancy options; you might be surprised at their offerings. And consider more than just individual device outages, too. What if you can’t get into your data center? Taking a hybrid approach to infrastructure design, where you rely on a diverse set of tools to prepare you for a wide range of potential problems, will let you maintain the redundancy and high availability that your users and customers expect.

Monitor Your Data Centers

Now is the time to monitor your IT operations even more closely than usual to spot extremes and help with scalability and capacity planning. Can your infrastructure handle the increase of users and transactions? Are you accounting for handling higher volumes that come with an increasingly remote workforce? How would your organization handle a service disruption if you experienced an outage? Closely monitoring your IT and security resources to look for spikes and surges can guard against oversaturation and could help justify offloading workloads to cloud data centers.

Malicious actors often ramp up their activities in times of crisis, specifically because they know that companies’ focus is otherwise occupied. Automated monitoring can greatly assist in preventing these types of attacks, but only if proper baselines and profiles are established. For example, looking at an enterprise cryptographic ecosystem, if a bank knows its HSMs are validating 10,000 PINs per second on average, and suddenly that number spikes to 100,000 per second, they should immediately investigate. Intelligent monitoring and health-checking technology is designed for these exact types of scenarios, as well as to identify infrastructure health issues so administrators can respond proactively rather than reactively.

Your organization’s IT infrastructure and data security are depended on to be reliable, and your IT operations continuity effort needs to be prioritized now more than ever. Here’s to keeping your employees, and your IT infrastructure, in good health.

— Ryan Smith

April 10, 2020
HPE Expects Increased Reliance on Virtual Desktops

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) is making it easier for organizations to migrate to virtual desktops that can be deployed on servers in an on-premises IT environment.

Peter Mansell, global practice director for digital workplace at HPE, said that in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic more organizations will be moving to centralize the management of desktops to make their IT environments more resilient. To facilitate that transition, HPE is making available servers that come pre-integrated with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) software from Citrix or VMware. Those servers can be acquired under standard acquisitions with 90-day payment deferrals if required or as short-term rentals, he said.

Alternatively, organizations can deploy VDI software on HPE Greenlake, a set of servers that HPE manages on behalf of customers.

Historically, the adoption of virtual desktops has been limited for reasons that range from total cost to simple inertia. However, one of the downstream impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic will be the greater centralization of desktop applications. In most cases, that will mean relying on either cloud services or VDI platforms that make it easier to access desktops remotely, Mansell said. The cloud, however, is not an option for many highly regulated industries that are required to maintain control over their IT infrastructure, he noted.

Of course, end users would still need to find a secure way to remotely access those servers assuming there is enough available bandwidth. However, from a management perspective, it would be much easier for IT administrators, who are now trying to push updates to a wide variety of devices as the bulk of the workforce continues to work from home indefinitely.

Up until now at least, resistance to centralizing desktops has been high among both end users and Microsoft. However, with the rise of the Azure cloud, Microsoft has been encouraging organizations to centralize management of desktops. Mansell said in addition to making VDI servers available, HPE is working with Microsoft to make virtual desktops running on the Azure cloud available to HPE customers as well. End users, meanwhile, increasingly rely on cloud applications, so the dependency they once had on applications that run locally has decreased considerably.

Each organization will need to determine whether it makes sense to centralize the management of desktops. Beyond ensuring business continuity, most organizations will be experiencing a significant amount of financial pressure in the months ahead. One way to reduce costs would be to reduce the number of IT administrators required to manage operating system and application updates across fleets of devices. In fact, some organizations may not even have to acquire fleets of devices if end users are employing their own machines to access virtual desktops.

Whatever the path forward, the COVID-19 pandemic has made more organizations aware of how easily their operations can be disrupted by events beyond their control. The issue now is coming up with a business continuity plan that minimizes the impact those disruptions can have on IT as much as possible.

— Mike Vizard

April 8, 2020
COVID-19 Reaction: Massive Spike in IT Incidents

A report published this week by PagerDuty, a provider of an incident management platform, finds organizations that rely on the platform to manage IT issues are managing on average double the number of incidents since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In some industry segments, such as online learning services, travel and entertainment services, the number of incidents has increased 11-fold, the report noted.

Rachel Obstler, vice president of product for PagerDuty, said with more people at home, online services that are seeing a spike in use while at the same time deploying new code to drive additional services are clearly stressed. Enterprise IT organizations, meanwhile, are now dealing with large numbers of employees trying to remotely access a wide range of applications simultaneously. Incidents now range from relatively simple authentication issues to accelerating the rollout of a digital business initiative to help maintain business continuity, she noted.

Many of those organizations were already short of staff before the COVID-19 pandemic so longstanding challenges in many cases are now being further exacerbated, added Obstler. In addition, organizations that are rushing to deploy applications to enable their organizations to maintain business continuity are likely to not have tested those applications as thoroughly as they once might have. Inevitably, that decision will result in more IT incidents as issues are discovered after those applications are deployed in a production environment.

Naturally, there may be a temptation to suspend rollouts of new applications. However, with millions of individuals now required to work from home for an indefinite amount of time, digital business applications may be the only way to engage those individuals. In fact, Obstler noted that as working remotely becomes the new normal, many people are about to become a lot more proficient at both working and shopping from home. As such, digital business applications may soon become the primary medium through which organizations engage their end customers.

On the plus side, Obstler said it’s now relatively simple to deliver IT services from anywhere in the world, so there is an opportunity to bulk up existing IT support staff. Of course, the pool of IT professionals who are available to hire should also increase as vertical industries such as the travel and hospitality sectors essentially shut down.

It’s too early to say precisely how the COVID-19 pandemic will impact the IT sector. While there will certainly be layoffs, many organizations will be loath to let go of IT staff who will be difficult to replace once the immediate economic recession ends. Countries around the world are also making funds available to companies on the condition they keep layoffs to a minimum.

Regardless of how many IT people are retained, however, the remaining IT staff will continue to be stressed. Many organizations are going to have to re-engineer IT processes by, for example, embracing best DevOps practices on the fly to adjust to a new reality. Many of the IT issues about to be encountered might not always be within the control of IT teams to address. However, business leaders will expect that one way or another those IT staff will come up with the innovative workarounds needed to enable the business to continue to survive and thrive.

— Mike Vizard

March 26, 2020
Why the Buzz on Software-Defined Everything (SDx)?
You’ve likely heard the buzz getting louder the last few years around software-defined everything (SDx). You’re probably finding a swarm of companies knocking on your door selling a host of services around implementing software-defined networking (SDN), software-defined storage (SDS) and software-defined data center (SDDC). What you may not realize is that this software-defined movement is truly a disruptive technology shift that is dramatically changing the way an organization accesses storage, networks and data centers.

The overarching mission of SDx is to break down the discrete IT silos (compute, storage and networking) by using software to bridge the technological and organizational gaps. By giving software systems a starring role in managing different kinds of hardware, the premise is that productivity will increase through more robust network access from both portable and traditional devices.

What are the true potential and outcomes of SDx that an IT administrator can tout to management? For starters, early adopters have reported being able to deliver significant cost savings and greater speed of delivery. They cite benefits such as decreased hardware costs, greater automation, more rapid deployment of IT resources and shorter timelines to implementation—to name the key ones.

Let’s take the traditional data center, where most organizations grapple with the high costs of ongoing management and maintenance of network switches, servers, storage devices and other hardware. Keeping these resources updated can be complex and expensive for an IT department. Moving to an SDDC, for example, can lower the total cost of ownership by reducing hardware costs (servers, racks, disk and tape, routers, etc.), and minimizing the data center size and the use of power, cooling and ongoing maintenance. With an SDDC, the IT department enjoys the benefits of a more simplified process that increases the speed of appropriating and provisioning networking. Software-automated provisioning can enable application deployment within minutes, for example.

Instead of the IT department being considered a hindrance, SDDC allows developers to create applications that are best for the business, instead of what works based on the hardware.

“Every technology organization needs to be able to transform ideas into working functionality that creates value for customers. That means you need not only world-class development processes but infrastructure processes as well—and that’s where software-defined data centers become absolutely relevant,” said Gene Kim, co-author of “The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win.”

The main elements of an SDDC include:
- A software implementation of a computer, which is called virtualization.
- An SDN where hardware and software resources are merged into a software-based virtual network.
- An SDS that includes storage virtualization.
- Automation software that allows an IT administrator to provision, control and manage all SDDCs components.
The second big driver of SDx adoption by IT departments is the increased agility they experience in responding to business demands. Much of this is made possible with SDS, which is an innovative way to restructure your infrastructure by separating hardware from software, and using software in place of disks and networking devices. SDS uses standard servers to manage storage requests by virtualizing your physical storage. This gives you more control over where and how data is stored.

Some of the key benefits of SDS over traditional storage include:
- Automatic storage management capabilities reduce the number of manual tasks for your storage administrators. They adapt to different needs without any human oversight or new hardware requirements.
- Flexibility to increase your storage requirements while decreasing the capacity of your existing hardware.
- Lower costs since SDS solutions run on standard hardware, and the automation reduces the number of administrators required.
- More scalability options, depending on your business requirements, by adding extra storage arrays or including additional CPUs and memory.
As business requirements continue to increase in speed and number, forward-thinking IT departments are moving away from hardware commitments and rigid architectures that constrict their ability to react and adjust to changing needs. Software-defined technologies are becoming the innovative powerhouses behind building more efficient and agile IT services for today and well into the future.

— Melinda Cross
March 25, 2020
Taking the Fear Out of Legacy Modernization

Once a cutting edge and golden standard of technology, legacy-based monolithic applications have become a big burden for many organizations. While pivotal in supporting business functions, they have and will continue to lose the flexibility and overall usability required to be successful in today’s competitive digital and agile business landscape.

But for most businesses, and especially the Fortune 1000s, looking to streamline their services and improve overall functionality, the prospect of breaking away from these systems is often seen as a double-edged sword. Ridding themselves of brittle, complex and tightly integrated technology, on one hand, can provide the right environment to introduce newer software. This can help elevate their businesses to be nimbler, more innovative and productive, ultimately driving better experiences and increased revenue. On the other hand, though, maintaining them can be viewed as the safer option that doesn’t include the fear of lost business intelligence, downtime for consumers and the biggest of all, an exorbitant cost that they simply can’t justify.

What’s important for them to realize is these modernization efforts don’t always require a complete overhaul or significant downtime to operations from rearchitecting or reengineering their applications. In fact, any organization in need of change can choose from a variety of alternative modernization processes that best suit their needs.

Below is a closer look at those opportunities and success stories from BBVA, Companies House and MTA after implementation.

Automated Conversion

With many large financial institutions, for instance, they are often running mission-critical applications and processes on their legacy systems that reduce their ability to meet the demand of modern business processes. As they look to reduce costs, enable data and business process integration to better navigate an increasingly global banking landscape, legacy modernization is top of mind. To make necessary changes and continue business as usual, one of the best strategies could be automated conversion.

By utilizing the necessary tools, an organization can produce a revitalized version of their legacy system in a new environment in a modern code, such as Java or C#. Through this process, once an application and/or database is translated, developers are uniquely positioned to maintain business logic from their legacy system while extending application functionality and enabling enhanced integration capabilities for target databases. Because this approach is software-based, this modernization strategy is significantly less costly and can be completed in steps to minimize any interruption to business.

In the case of BBVA, the second largest bank in Spain that operates in over 40 countries, the organization needed to reduce licensing costs of its mainframe and enhance its features, simultaneously freeing data trapped within its legacy system to enable these global operations. By pursuing an automated conversion to its systems, the bank was able to convert its code while taking total technical inventory, identifying key risk factors in its mainframe and ultimately removing significant amounts of dead code and approximately 38% of its programs.

As a result of the reduced cost of its mainframe operations, the company achieved positive ROI of their transformation strategy within two years.

Data Replication

Fully rewriting applications can be time consuming, costly and risky, with the potential loss of vital information and processes. An alternative option to keep the legacy system fully intact while freeing essential data from its mainframe is data replication.

Data replication allows an organization to replicate its mainframe and non-relational data through an entirely new, relational model. This allows the legacy system to continue with its standard functions, but automatically copy and convert data to the new model with a full replica of the legacy database, enabling greater visibility and flexibility for a business.

This process was especially effective for Companies House, Britain’s government bureau that records and stores information on the country’s 1.8 million unique companies. Since the organization requires daily data updates because of the need for public access to this information, the organization couldn’t afford any downtime while modernizing. By replicating its data onto a relational model, the company was not only able to more seamlessly integrate its code into its target database, but more easily manage daily updates to its data–ultimately resulting in faster service for consumers and significantly reduced costs for the company.

Batch Offloading

Many legacy systems remain fully intact today because of their incredible ability to process vast amounts of data in a reliable and effective fashion. That said, as the amount of information within the system grows, so do the costs of maintaining these systems. For organizations with limited IT budgets and resources, the ideal approach lies in batch offloading.

Batch offloading is often an easy first step in a modernization effort. This process requires an organization to convert one or more batch process applications to modern programming languages. By moving some of these processes off of the mainframe, organizations can future-proof their processes, maintain greater flexibility and reduce costs. These savings can also trickle down to the consumer, giving these organizations an edge against their competitors.

For New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the organization aimed to move critical applications off its legacy mainframe to make way for refreshed, cost-effective platforms. By undertaking the batch offloading strategy, the MTA continued without any interruption or significant changes to its mainframe’s processes for users. The organization was able to reduce the costs from maintaining its legacy system and prepare for the next steps in its broader modernization strategy.

Choosing the Right Approach

A business doesn’t have to be a member of the Fortune 1000 in order to successfully execute a modernization project like one. By developing a strong understanding of the functions of current systems, the risks associated with maintaining it, organizational needs and a realistic timeline for transformation efforts, a company can uniquely position itself to make significant changes to operations without interruptions to business.

While this transition is a significant undertaking for any organization, it’s up to them to identify the best modernization strategy for its goals in order to reduce costs, improve the customer experience and future-proof their processes to achieve overall success.

— Cameron Jenkins

March 18, 2020