Building Agility, Efficiency, and Simplicity into Infrastructure Is Fastest Way to Transform IT

Just about every organization wishes they could make IT more agile. But a new survey of over 4,000 IT leaders conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) indicates most organizations are finding the sheer weight of their disparate legacy systems slows their progress towards achieving that goal.

As we know, and as the survey makes clear, most organizations encounter tough challenges when modernizing their IT environments. Only six percent of the organizations surveyed have managed to fully align IT and the business. Compared to the same ESG survey a year ago, that represents just a total increase of one percent.

Organizations are making some progress, just not at a rate that many of them are likely to find satisfactory. The ESG survey asks respondents to rank their transformation from Legacy (Stage 1) to Transformed (Stage 4). In between are Emerging (Stage 2) and Evolving (Stage 3). Year over year, the survey finds that 88 percent of respondents rate themselves as being at either Stage 2 or Stage 3. While at first glance that may seem like substantial progress, it only represents a collective five percent increase year over year. Stage 2 is up four percent, while Evolving was up only one percent. Clearly, there’s a major hurdle being encountered as organizations try to move beyond Stage 2, which ESG describes as being the early stages of adopting modern IT processes.

Transforming IT is one of those classic chicken and the egg equations. It’s challenging to modernize legacy systems that were never designed to be automated. The good news is that modern converged and hyper-converged infrastructure embed automation benefits required to make IT environments agile enough to meet the dynamic demands of a truly digital business.

At Dell EMC, we’ve identified five foundational pillars of organization that form our converged and hyper-converged philosophy and yield the best outcomes for businesses on their IT transformation journey:

Engineered as one: Pre-engineered and validated from the ground up.

Manufactured as one: Dell EMC converged and hyper-converged systems are factory and logically built with exacting quality.

Managed as one: Centralized management options for getting the most out of your infrastructure resources.

Sustained as one: Backed by holistic lifecycle management, derisking updates and providing the utmost in stability.

Supported as one: One-call support to save time, money, and resources.

One of the best examples of those five pillars being implemented in a turnkey fashion is the Dell EMC VxBlock System 1000. Converged systems such as VxBlock 1000 enable businesses to flexibly offer the right mix of resources and data services, increase data center efficiency, and deliver a turnkey engineered system experience with lifecycle assurance. All these benefits transform IT and free the organization to focus on innovation.

“Since implementing Dell EMC VxBlock and VxRail, we spend four to six hours per week managing systems, not up to three days,” says Aponte. “We can now focus more on how IT can provide value for the business, for example, helping engineers do more with operational technology or introducing automation,” said Corey Aponte, server administrator at Johnsonville Sausage.

Since implementing Dell EMC VxBlock and VxRail, we spend four to six hours per week managing systems, not up to three days.

Complementing the VxBlock System in the Dell EMC CI/HCI portfolio are Dell EMC hyper-converged appliances such as VxRail and XC Series, and hyper-converged systems like VxRack FLEX and VxRack SDDC. Each provides a transformational resource to simplify the complex status quo of IT, enabling organizations to become more agile and efficient.

To learn more about how Dell EMC converged and hyper-converged infrastructure can help transform IT for your business, visit DellEMC.com/CI.

If you’re attending Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas this May, be sure to visit the Converged and Hyper-Converged product sections where you can take a look at the industry’s leading portfolio firsthand, play a CI trivia game, and speak with our CI/HCI experts.

Read the ESG report here.