Organisations have long since looked at IT not just as a maintainer of their existing business infrastructure, but also as an enabler of new business and accelerator of innovation.

Also, with the advent of new technologies and changes in the way of working, traditional IT departments are soon going to be a legacy of the past.

Because of these increasing complexities it is expected that global data centre IP traffic will nearly triple over the next five years. Application consumption will take up 41% of the IT budget, while increasing technological complexity will lead to 75% of resources dedicated to IT maintenance

As such, one of the most pressing challenges faced by the CIOs of any organisation is how to keep the IT strategy aligned with the business strategy, and their aged data centres upgraded and running with reduced operation cost.

>See also: Will public cloud kill the data centre?

In order to leverage these changing dynamics and utilise technology as a competitive advantage for the business, organisation in any industry should look for data centre modernisation.

Data centre modernisation is a way of transforming the existing data centre using the latest technologies and trends in order to improve the overall functionality and performance, and cater to the emerging business needs.

It is an amalgamation of technologies, processes, skills and services improvements in order to come up with a highly responsive, agile, automated and sustainable data centre environment.

For any organisation, data is the backbone of business information and critical to making any business-related decision. The way these data are stored in the data centres, and the efficiency in which IT manages and processes of these data, also plays a critical role in running the business.

Also with the increasing need for using fast-paced technology at reduced cost of operation and innovation to achieve differentiation and competitive advantage, it is high time for an organisation to look at data centre modernisation.

Modernisation can help IT departments understand the business objectives of the organisation and map the technical infrastructure strategy and roadmap for the same.

It can also reduced the cost of operation by abandoning aged, legacy data centre infrastructure with high maintenance cost, and boost IT productivity and quality of services.

Leveraging the cloud

Modernisation of data centres is not just about adding more servers, storage or network to the existing data centre. It is about creating a holistic and scalable IT solution that takes into consideration the economic perspective, technological modernisation, people and processes to cater to ever changing demands from increasing business needs.

Also, managing the upsurge of the unstructured data that is being generated across all the industries is one of the top challenges that can be diluted by data centre modernisation.

Because of all these reasons, leveraging cloud for data centre modernisation has become a strong prerogative. Exploring cloud models not only provides a financial advantage, it also brings scalability, better communication, maintenance benefits etc. – all at reduced cost of operations.

With the upsurge of multiple public cloud service providers, providing fast-paced computing at increasingly lower cost, building in-house capabilities is no longer the priority.

By creating hybrid solutions, as a connection between internal private cloud/on-premise infrastructure and external public clouds, organisation can not only become the consumer of IT services, but also can bring in transformation to their existing data centre infrastructure on a need-based requirement.

Competing with external cloud also puts organisation to strive for higher efficiency for their data centres. With critical applications and data housed in an internal cloud and leveraging public cloud on a need basis, organisations can come up with an efficient hybrid cloud-based data centre modernisation model that is both scalable and cost effective.

Industries like banking, retail, healthcare, farming, travel and hospitality are finding themselves with a growing number of customers demanding “digitalisation” of the services.

Such growth leads to a point where the existing IT infrastructure is no longer able to accommodate the rapid expansion of the business. The legacy infrastructure hardware also acts as a bottleneck for expansion or upgrades.

A financial holding company focused on business and consumer banking took up data centre modernisation through re-design and implementation of a robust new data centre, which also acted as the core for their business operations.

>See also: Inside the UK’s first collaborative data centre

This transformation of the data centre helped in automation of mundane repeatable tasks and reduction of resolution time. The redesigning also led to cross training of team members across multiple technology tracks for efficient support coverage and better SLA adherence.

This is an era that, with the advent of new technologies like digitalisation, the Internet of Things, cloud and mobility, will disrupt the way IT industry works.

Organisation can no longer rely on their existing on-premise data centres to provide them with competitive advantages in such a pandemonium of cut-throat competition and bursting technologies.

Modernising the existing data centres, leveraging virtualisation, automation, cloud and by converting the IT requirement into a consumption driven ‘as-a-service’ model is one of the best ways for any organisation to control cost and stay relevant.

This ‘innovation through data centre modernisation’ is the next thing every organisation should look for.

Sourced from R Koushik and Amrita Sen, Mindtree