EXPERT OPINION
People, applications
and IT: The trifecta of
modernisation resilience planning
Data centre modernisation
strategies should be built
around three key aspects:
people, applications and
infrastructure. John Young,
Solution Architecture and
Engineering, Sungard
Availability Services, tells
us about the potential risks
large-scale modernisation
strategies pose to these
three groups, with
suggestions for how to
overcome them.
e know of no vendor or
service provider today
whose business model
offerings and revenue
growth are not influenced
by the increasing adoption of cloud-first
strategies.” Those were the words of
Gartner analyst Sig Nag, commenting on
the firm’s recent finding that the public
cloud services market was projected to
grow a staggering 17.5% in 2019 to
total US$214.3 billion.
“W
While the cloud is transforming
businesses of all types, a major aspect
of its appeal for traditional companies
specifically is the role it plays in
modernising existing IT structures.
Migrating existing IT to an Infrastructure-
as-a-Service (IaaS) model in particular
can be a boon to overall modernisation
strategies, with pay-as-you-use pricing
structures helping to both streamline
and scale IT spending to meet changing
levels of service demand, while also
freeing up IT teams and their budgets
to focus on implementing new tools,
products and services. However, with all
the excitement around cloud, businesses
40
Issue 12
must not underestimate the gravity that
moving to a cloud-based business model
entails. Migrating to the cloud is as
much about mitigating risk as it is about
transforming business components and
often even identifying where risk lies can
be half the battle.
The only reliable defence against
uncertainty when planning cloud-based
modernisation projects is to make
resilience a strategic imperative. Here,
we look at how to make three core
components of modernisation more
resilient: people, applications and IT.
People
One of the biggest challenges faced by
businesses undergoing major change is
mitigating its people-level impact. Imagine
you have been doing a particular role for
a number of years and you’ve come to
expect the type of jobs and tasks you’ll
be facing on a daily basis. Not only do
you know that role well, but you’re highly
skilled and a valued part of the business.
Then all of a sudden, the business tells you
your role is changing, or worse still, that
www.intelligentdatacentres.com