Future-Proofing Your Business: Building Resiliency Against The Next Crisis
Enterprise Bare Metal in Data Centers
What you learn from weathering a crisis offers up the chance for long-term resilience
Businesses are moving away from centralized infrastructure, and this digital transformation requires agility, innovation, and connectivity to Edge and critical applications, regardless of location. This, of course, begs the question of where, then, do you put your infrastructure to better serve customers? Is it even possible to deliver higher resiliency with the same cost predictability you get through on-site corporate data centers? Just how do you get a truly resilient infrastructure that gives you the baseline capabilities you require to really push forward with innovation?
It’s enough to make your head spin.
Flattening the curve
We covered these questions in the recent webinar with IDC, “Building Resiliency to Thrive in the Next Normal,” and one thing we discussed was that while crises might come in all different shapes and sizes, the business of coping with them from an enterprise perspective is fairly consistent. After the initial crisis passes, companies are left to manage the slowdown, optimize their financial resources, and then, finally, begin to create a resilience that will not only see them through the long term but that can be used as a platform from which to springboard business growth.
Just as the pandemic has put a spotlight on an organization's challenges, it has also offered enterprises the opportunity to pivot. The companies that will not only survive the current crisis but come out ahead recognize that the decisions they make today have far-reaching consequences and, if made wisely, can bring long-term benefits.
As businesses think through their investments for the coming six months to a year, CIOs need to be asking themselves: How do I ensure resilience for my company? How do I find or enhance my current infrastructure while I drive innovation?
Some investments will be used to solve whatever weaknesses this crisis has exposed. But taken as part of a larger picture, the right investment can help cement a company’s future resilience and accelerate planned business change. Companies need to be able to respond immediately to market changes, and that means having the solutions and resources in place that allow them to gather and analyze data in real time and respond accordingly and at scale. And this makes finding the right partner all the more important.
Laundry list of issues and opportunities
As CIOs begin to evaluate the various issues surrounding resilience, whether those are the cloud-first/cloud-smart initiatives or determining which workloads and applications belong on which platform (i.e., public cloud, hosted private cloud, or third-party colocation), we’re also seeing them grapple with shrinking capital budgets and growing pressure to extricate themselves from their corporate data centers and move to new platforms. In turn, IT infrastructure leaders are pressing for accelerated value out of these new platforms and, in doing so, have created the perfect storm, where the renewed focus on digital transformation has ratcheted up the pressure for IT infrastructure leaders to do more with less.
Meeting the growing laundry list of needs means a robust, modern, and flexible hybrid IT environment near corporate business interests. The ability to leverage a partner that offers these capabilities cannot be understated. As companies generate and consume ever increasing amounts of data, they require partners that provide access to new, sophisticated compute resources (bare metal computing systems, for instance), and make them available outside the corporate data center.
The resource consumption paradigm of the modern enterprise means that partners must be able to deliver enterprise bare metal as a service capability. It’s that kind of innovation that’s allowing businesses to create resilience with the same levels of cost-predictability, control, security, and compliance as they have seen with traditional IT infrastructure resources. By adhering to this new paradigm not only can they consume resources that match new OpEx models but also facilitate distributed, global hybrid infrastructures.
Agility is essential to all of this. The ability to get the resources where you need them, when you need them has always been a challenge, but it’s even more critical today because that’s how business resiliency is being defined. It’s important, then, for IT infrastructure leaders to start doing a thorough analysis of which partners and providers can go beyond just providing a service to actually anticipating the needs and requirements of the IT infrastructure leadership and then be able to quickly deliver the next thing needed.
A trusted ecosystem
It’s rare that a single provider or a single partner can deliver everything. And, you don’t want to get locked into certain services that are only pieces of a large whole and ultimately have to change 12 months down the road. Being able to work with a partner that gives you access to a rich ecosystem of additional partners that can bring their value-added services to create a holistic story is surfacing to the top of IT infrastructure managers’ must-haves list.
A good partner supports your organization, works alongside IT infrastructure leaders, and provides insight into what’s needed in the future. Being a trusted advisor today may not look or feel like a traditional partner-provider relationship but it’s this innovation that’s moving enterprises forward. At Cyxtera we are constantly looking at how to help partners build that resilience, how to operate in the new normal, and how to prepare them for the innovation required for the next normal.
To get you started, check out Cyxtera’s Digital Resiliency Checklist, which outlines the five requirements enterprises need to have in order to take advantage of the current crisis and transform your business today and for the future, or listen to our on-demand webinar.
Views and opinions expressed in our blog posts are those of the employees who made them and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Company. A reader should not unduly rely on any statements made therein.
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