Intelligent Data Centres Issue 12 | Page 40

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