A modern data centre must provide the agility , security and scalability needed to power growth and innovation . Ian Jansen Van Rensburg , Senior Systems Engineer and Lead Technologist at VMware Africa , explains why cloud and software vendors are critically important to help build data centres for the future .
igital Transformation is disrupting the fundamentals
D of doing business . Companies across industry sectors are under even more pressure to actively engage their customers and delight them with increased personalised experiences . With the pace of business also accelerating , IT organisations are exploring better ways to bring new products and services to market quickly .
To this end , they require a modern data centre that can provide the agility , security and scalability needed to power growth and innovation .
Such data centres must extend to public clouds while ensuring security , compliance and availability , all while optimising cost . This is where cloud and software vendors are critically important as they enable these companies to build data centres that are highly virtualised , software-defined , automated and intelligently managed , with a consistent operational model across hybrid clouds . As a result , IT infrastructure can become more agile and scalable in support of today ’ s modern applications and business requirements .
Changing infrastructure
Linked to this is modernising the infrastructure itself . Today ’ s infrastructure is based on a software-defined hyperconverged architecture across compute , storage , network and security . This approach delivers enterprise-ready , high-performance infrastructure that is more flexible because it is hardware independent . Furthermore , it also provides more agility thanks to being highly programmable . Ultimately , these
combine to deliver a modern data centre cost-effectively due to it being scalable on a granular level and based on commodity hardware .
However , companies are facing challenges on multiple fronts when considering their existing data centre environments . Many are grappling with infrastructures built on complex architectures and processes . These legacy systems cannot deliver the agility and flexibility businesses require to thrive . To simplify this , IT teams need an integrated approach that enables them to deploy fast , manage and scale infrastructure and applications .
In difficult economic conditions , IT departments also face shrinking or static budgets . This makes it impossible to meet business demands with traditional infrastructure models reliably . Traditional infrastructure environments are expensive and difficult to scale . These also require specialised skillsets that are hard to find and even harder to replace . In some cases , line-of-business organisations are deploying public and hybrid cloud services that can deliver agility and flexibility to solve issues that internal IT organisations cannot yet address . However , public cloud adoption
Automation reinventing the data centre
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