Is your IT Infrastructure running out of space?

Is your IT Infrastructure running out of space?

There’s no excuse – if you’re having space constraints, you’re actually constraining the agility of the business your IT department serves!

Today businesses need to address problems and opportunities quickly. With a focus on business intelligence, IoT, big data, etc – IT is critical to business success – particularly in public service organisations.

On-premise systems by definition have capacity limits, in compute or storage. Once at capacity, no additional systems or workloads can be provisioned. Business agility is reduced.

We’ve never met a CEO who enjoys the CIO telling them “No – we can’t do that!”

So – what are the potential issues with on-site infrastructure?

  1. There is a physical storage or compute constraint
  2. There are delays and costs involved in removing this constraint
  3. Any unresolved constraint has a demonstrable, negative impact on the business
  4. Generally technology is supported by the vendor for 3 years – upgrading re-starts the process of expenditure, impending limitations etc.

Embracing a new paradigm

The public cloud – Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform  – should be considered:

  1. There are no boundaries – new systems can be “spun up” as required
  2. Access to additional infrastructure is instant
  3. Ongoing on-premise hardware upgrades, maintenance costs etc disappear
  4. Cloud does a lot more than “host servers” including the following to name just a few:
    1. Backups – reduce the necessity for tape/disk-based backup, and reduce the cost of long term off-site storage
    2. Archive – move old, infrequently used data to inexpensive yet readily accessible off-site locations
    3. Platform as a Service – use cloud to reduce the space required to implement operating systems – providing more provisioning, and hence more business agility.

The 5 key questions for you to consider

  1. Which – if any – public cloud(s) should my organisation embrace?
  2. Which workloads, storage elements etc should we move to the cloud?
  3. What’s the best transition plan? How do we get there?
  4. How do we ensure appropriate governance, security etc?
  5. How do we get the best value?

Next steps

To find the answers to the above – and any other questions –  go to our infrastructure storage assessment page and answer a few brief questions and we will contact you to assist you identify your options.