Today’s companies must continually adapt to changing demands, such as increasing numbers of mobile users, diverse applications and platforms, and traditional infrastructure may struggle to keep up.
As technologies are continuing to evolve during this era of upheaval and transformation, businesses are susceptible to being sold ideas about modern infrastructure that are in fact based on myth. It is not until after the products or services have been purchased that IT leaders come to discover they don’t live up to promises made.
The best way for companies to avoid being taken in is to ensure they understand the myths versus the reality of propositions being made about modern infrastructure today.
The cloud is not one place
The cloud is becoming a critical element of every business IT infrastructure, and there are endless debates about its speed, expense, safety, and so on. But it is important to remember the cloud is not a single place or location.
The infrastructure of a cloud data centre differs somewhat from that of a traditional, on-premise data centre. Workloads may be running in the cloud, some in an on-premise data centre, and most businesses these days use a hybrid cloud. A hybrid cloud might mean the use of multiple cloud suppliers.
There are several reasons why applications or data cannot be moved to public cloud infrastructure, including regulation, latency, offline accessibility, and others.
Businesses shifting to a cloud-first approach should consider whether it is a cost-effective option to choose public cloud, what the benefits will be, and if it is a better decision even if it isn’t cheaper in the long run. Considerations to take into account are if there are compliance or regulatory issues with moving to the cloud, and whether unified management is possible for all your infrastructure.
Infrastructure doesn’t need to be an independent build
Traditionally, organisations would construct their own infrastructure by purchasing servers, storage, and network switches from different suppliers and putting them together. Today, you can purchase an infrastructure stack that is ready to go with little or no assembly required, for example, if you choose the public cloud.
Infrastructure is available in a variety of forms, including traditional, converged, hyper-converged, composable, and dedicated.
Moving to the public cloud is just one approach to doing this. With the distributed cloud, public cloud providers place a substation of their infrastructure at your site in order to make their native services available to applications and data running in your data centre.
Automation doesn’t equal cost savings
As infrastructure becomes more complex and sizable, infrastructure automation is the natural solution to the problem of infrastructure management. It is often suggested IT automation will save money but the reality is automation shifts labour rather than removes it, which improves the infrastructure but doesn’t necessarily make it cheaper. Infrastructure automation typically does not result in actual savings, although it remains very valuable since time and money are better utilised on higher-priority projects.
Autonomous infrastructure
While there are vendors who promise to deliver autonomous infrastructure powered by artificial intelligence, to be truly autonomous the system would need to be able to make decisions alone, which isn’t possible with available technology.
That said, artificial intelligence for operations (AIOps) supports decision-making for human operators. Machine learning algorithms can sift through large volumes of data and identify correlations that humans are unable to do. AIOps is also useful for predictive analytics, such as forecasting or identifying root causes of problems. AIOps cannot conceive a solution or repair the issues it identifies without human intervention or direction.
Get future ready with business IT support
The hype surrounding new technologies should not distract you from their potential, but you should be aware of them. The less familiar you are with any technology, the more careful you should be in assessing it. The IT infrastructure experts at INTELLIWORX can design, upgrade and manage your IT infrastructure to ensure your business thrives.
