Be Prepared For Infrastructure Change...

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, the time for digital transformation to happen has started to hit crunch time, and then some.

I recently reported on an IT event in Central Londinium, an LNETM event looking at workplace migration with a finance audience focus – one of the most affected areas for digitisation – which majored on the issues of OS and app migration. The report is here: http://bit.ly/LNETMReport – and it’s a real insight into the real world right now; financial giants (with the names obscured to protect the innocent (and not so innocent!) having to cope with a stupendous amount of change that could make or break their companies, however illustrious the history.

Key takeaways from the event very much mirrored the recent conversations with “intent aware” Apstra, that was the focus of the previous blog entry – I love it when you finally get some consensus in IT direction – such as:

• One of the biggest challenges to migration is not necessarily technology-related, but the culture change, notably at board level.
• The traditional 3-5-year migration window is no longer applicable, but is difficult to move away from as migration budgets effectively shrink.
• DevOps changes are forcing a rethinking of behaviour around the traditional IT infrastructure.
• At board level, more collaboration is required, notably between CEO and CIO roles.
• Change is essential – mandatory – but doing it badly can be catastrophic to a business, especially in the financial services sector. As part of that change, risk, costs and competitive advantage all need to be managed in equal measure.
• Using the right technology (like Rimo3, Juriba and Lakeside who presented at that event – see the report link for more details) is essential to enable companies to migrate successfully; the manual approach is simply not a cost or time effective option.

Having only completed my most recent update analysis on aforementioned Rimo3’s OS/app migration automation platform:

https://rimo3.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Broadband_Testing_Rimo3_ACTIV_Report.pdf

– the feedback from top level guys at the coal face, was both rewarding and very reassuring, if a little bit scary!

What IT departments are dealing with right now is nothing new; migration and the need to automate where possible have been ongoing requirements for decades. The difference now is that, even solely looking at the Windows 10 OS environment – the migration issue isn’t a “must get around to it sometime, otherwise we might see problems” but a MUST DO scenario. Companies don’t have the option.

At the same time, the whole of IT infrastructure really is changing – and very rapidly – from DevOps, to SecOps, to cloud and beyond. Vendors basically are moving forward, and companies are simply having to ride the wave with them, whatever it takes to do so. What it does take is making use of relevant third-party products and services, otherwise the incredibly tight time scales will render any “manual” attempt at such a transformation impossible. This is no idle, “FUD factor” vendor threat: we are seeing daily examples of businesses – many historically very powerful and seeming indestructible – falling by the wayside as they fail to keep up with the digital transformation so essential to ongoing success; retail and banking being two such examples.

Businesses need to fully accept the transformation requirement, identify which vendor partners can help with that migration and commence the process – now! Automation is clearly a critical element of that migration, as is the re-alignment and re-allocation of IT structure and resource.

Anyway, I urge you to read the event report at the URL given earlier for a full appreciation of how critical the timing is right now. Regardless of everything else that is going on in the world!