6 Ways to Enhance Your IT Infrastructure
It’s no secret that AI and cloud technologies have a disruptive impact on IT. This affects everything from compute and storage requirements, to developer tools. The hardware you choose today needs to meet your requirements, as well as be flexible enough to work for you down the road. So what are some ways you can enhance your IT infrastructure and bring your environment closer to meeting new technology expectations?
1. Get cloud enabled
Have you been considering public or private cloud migration? As you transition to a cloud infrastructure, you need the ability to handle flexible consumption models, changing customer needs and cloud-based application development. Your developers need a platform that lets them use the operating systems and languages they are already familiar with and access the latest open source tools to maximize productivity.
Look for cloud-enabled servers designed to meet these needs that offer you operating system and language flexibility. It’s a good idea to spec something that gives you an open, secure hybrid cloud to facilitate collaboration and agile developments.
Cloud enabled can also mean extending the value of your enterprise applications, connecting these systems to cloud services, with secure container technologies and microservices, can mean rapidly delivering new services.
2. Become AI ready
Deep learning, machine learning and AI are now more accessible than ever, and an increasing number of enterprises are capitalizing on these technologies for added business value.
Running a proof of concept is one thing, but when an organization is ready to deploy an AI solution into production, the right processor architecture and server hardware are essential.
3. Gain insights into your data
Your business is driven by data, and harnessing the power of your data is critical to your competitive advantage. Some options offer a broad portfolio of storage solutions to help you distill insights from your data and help you enable new insights about your data.
You can even gain a new level of visibility across your storage environment to help manage complex storage infrastructure and make cost-effective decisions. You can seek options that deploy quickly and save storage administration time, while optimizing the storage environment.
4. Consider your storage options
Storage isn’t just about big external hard drives anymore. Storage today is encapsulated in a wide array of technology options that optimize the analysis and processing of a range of data types from myriad sources. Multiple options need to be considered, and different workloads call for different solutions:
Flash storage is engineered to meet modern high-performance application requirements for data with a high frequency of use. Next-generation IBM Flash storage includes innovations such as inline data reduction with no performance impact.
Software-defined storage (SDS) is the foundation for digital transformation. It helps you to manage data growth and enables multi-cloud flexibility by providing an agile and operations-friendly IT infrastructure.
Hybrid storage arrays enable you to control costs with an optimized mix of storage media. With nearly unlimited configuration options, you can tailor a system to your needs.
Tape storage for infrequently accessed data helps to improve your data economics. These are available in drives, libraries, virtual tape systems and archive software which makes tape as easy to use as disk storage.
5. Protect your valuable data
As businesses adapt to capitalize on digital transformation, trust will be the currency that drives this new economy. How can you earn that digital trust? Look to pervasive encryption for all data, at rest and in motion, without changing application code. The result is data security at a lower price point than competing solutions.
6. Unleash the mainframe
Transform your data into insight with no data movement—processing isn’t slowed, and data isn’t exposed to risk, with some mainframe applications. Capitalizing on the power of your mainframe can mean big things for your organization, and the possibilities are almost limitless.
With so many options for enhancing your IT infrastructure, keeping these six key areas in mind as you assess and update your IT infrastructure to meet new technology expectations makes the transition a smooth one. There are so many options out there, so feel free to reach out to a trusted technology partner who can help you assess, prioritize and implement some of these great enhancements.
