Overcoming the Top 3 Challenges of Infrastructure Modernization
For today’s organizations, modernization is imperative. Technology leaders know that to drive business value, they must evolve their infrastructure to be more efficient, flexible and cost-effective.
Modern technologies such as serverless computing and containerization on cloud platforms offer compelling means to meet these objectives but also an overwhelming array of potential paths. What to do is clear; how to do it is not.
IT needs to go beyond lifting and shifting to migrate and modernize with confidence.
This article will examine the top three challenges that IT teams face when migrating to new environments and, more importantly, how to solve them.
Modernization Challenge No. 1: Navigating the Complexities of Cloud Migration
Cloud computing has established itself as the operating system of the future. Traditional concerns over safety and reliability have transformed into appreciation for the cloud’s ability to enable innovation, adapt with ease and, when done right, control costs. The explosion of cloud-computing services evolving beyond an infrastructure-on-demand option gives organizations countless ways to deliver modern applications. But with choice comes complexity. In addition, the combination of providers and services is daunting, from AWS to Azure, IBM to Google Cloud Platform and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
This situation puts IT between the proverbial rock and hard place. If they choose one provider and go all in with a standard lift and shift, they lose the ability to optimize and fully leverage the platform services. Without optimization, it’s much harder to achieve the benefits that inspired the move to the cloud in the first place. However, analyzing all potential migration possibilities is time- and resource-prohibitive. Building a matrix of all the options would result in hundreds or thousands of permutations. Choosing the right mix becomes virtually impossible.
Both of these options make it difficult for IT to hit the sweet spot. You don’t want to under-provision due to risk-performance issues, but over-provisioning wastes money. Not to mention, cloud services are constantly changing. Migration needs to evolve to factor in business demands and new service availability. Without the ability to visualize, predict and optimize for current and future workloads, IT can’t capitalize on the full potential of the cloud.
Modernization Challenge No. 2: Right-Sizing and Optimizing Container Environments
Container environments like Kubernetes provide similar benefits and challenges as the cloud. Containers empower IT teams to increase efficiency, agility and speed, improving application life cycle management and making it faster and easier to modernize existing applications. Like the cloud, though, containers must be optimized to deliver on their ability to reduce costs and streamline performance.
To orchestrate containers effectively, IT must understand how to allocate them. As with cloud provisioning, under-allocating container resources can result in issues with service assurance, while over-allocation can lead to wasted spending, especially since individual application teams tend to request more resources than they need to be safe. Right-sizing container environments is particularly important when containers are used to manage the impact of fluctuating business demands on IT systems. It’s crucial to optimize container environments for your current state, but it’s also important to know what’s coming so resources can be allocated accordingly.
Modernization Challenge No. 3: Correlating Business Drivers with Demand on IT Systems
Containers and cloud aren’t the only systems that require IT teams to predict and plan for changing business demands. Modernizing your IT infrastructure requires clear visibility into how ups and downs in internal and external drivers can affect all of your systems; without it, you risk dramatic consequences to the business’s top and bottom lines.
The complexity of today’s environments makes this correlation more challenging than ever. Even with the right people, expertise and resources, a capacity-planning team still could not keep pace with the speed and unpredictability of the current market and understanding its impact on the underlying technology infrastructure and resources. Factoring in known or planned events and potential business scenarios through what-if planning is critical to proactively assess and manage risk. This enables action to be taken ahead of time and prevents service outages or performance degradation.
Critical Capabilities to Look for When Modernizing Your Infrastructure
Solving all three of these challenges requires the following capabilities:
- Cost and resource requirement comparisons to evaluate and right-size workload migrations based on your organization’s unique infrastructure and usage before — not after — selecting a cloud service provider
- Integrations to ingest metrics, events and topologies from third-party solutions for extensive visibility
- Dynamic service modeling for a comprehensive topology view of services that enables service-centric monitoring for continuous visibility into the state of business services
- Intelligent automation and analytics to identify opportunities for automated corrective action and to detect trends, patterns and anomalies before baselines are breached
- Artificial-intelligence- and machine-learning-driven event correlation, situation management and root-cause isolation to reduce mean time to repair (MTTR)
- Log analytics and enrichment across a wide variety of data sources to provide early diagnosis of potential issues and avoid service disruptions
- “What-if” simulations to see the impact of different business drivers and to right-size Kubernetes and optimize container environments, ensuring resources are appropriately provisioned and allocated
Reduce the Time, Complexity and Costs of Migrating to the Cloud
IT leaders must ensure they have the technology resources necessary for service assurance today and tomorrow — no matter how dynamic, complex or diverse their environment. Whether you are migrating from on premises to public cloud, from one cloud to another, or between clouds in a multicloud environment, predictive IT with AIOps, machine learning, advanced analytics and intelligent automation can provide the insights you need to balance risk, efficiency and IT spend while optimizing performance and availability.
