Infrastructure Modernization –Mobility and Scalability Through Cloud

Consumer expectations have shifted dramatically in the last two decades. Customers now expect real-time connected digital experiences. Many companies, particularly large traditional enterprises, have built their IT infrastructure on-premises. An organization’s IT backbone is comprised of legacy systems and applications. Simultaneously, these legacy systems and applications are struggling to achieve the scale and speed required to meet modern customer expectations. Business leaders and IT decision-makers are constantly forced to choose between legacy system maintenance and investing in innovative new products and services.

Businesses now have very realistic options for overcoming the challenges of an outdated IT infrastructure, by modernizing their infrastructure with Cloud Technology. This could mean moving away from investing resources to run and maintain existing IT infrastructure, and to focusing more on creating new higher value products and services. With Cloud, organizations can develop and build new applications at scale to drive better engagement with customers and employees. Enterprises are also reaping significant financial benefits from Cloud adoption as their approach to IT shifts from purchasing fixed capacity to paying only for what they use, changing the economics of technology investment. Using cloud technology to truly transform a business necessitates new collaborative models, a shift in culture and processes, and the ability to enable team productivity and innovation.

Infrastructure modernization can drive business model innovation

For most organizations, owning and operating infrastructure does not differentiate their business. In fact, it’s often a burden. It restricts an organization’s staff in a variety of ways. They must, for example, perform laborious tasks related to infrastructure, procurement, provisioning, and maintenance. They are still using old legacy systems. They don’t add any value to the business other than keeping the lights on, and don’t support business change. They can’t scale easily because they’re tied to what they have on site and are forced to pay to overprovision for peak usage.

Organizations might own their servers, data centers, cooling systems, the physical security features in place and the real estate to house all that infrastructure. In addition, they have to pay for maintenance and ongoing security costs. One option for reducing this burden is to outsource the company’s IT Infrastructure as much as possible and migrate to the cloud.

Benefits of migrating IT infrastructure to the Cloud

• Reduced Capex, cloud is a measured service which means organizations have lower up front or capital expenditure because they don’t have the need to purchase their own data center equipment or maintain their own IT infrastructure. Also, cloud reduces the need for IT teams to act as a gateway to technical resources such as network, security storage, compute power and data. Think of the cloud as an on-demand self service for anyone in the business.

• Global Reach as well as extensive network access, this means that access to data and compute resources is no longer limited by geography or location. Teams can now connect to compute resources and data with little to no latency.

• Resource Pooling, resources are distributed across a global network of data centers. For instance if one is down due to a natural disaster, another data center is available to prevent service disruption.

• Minimized Hardware Maintenance, infrastructure maintenance work can be outsourced to the external service providers. So, it’s easier to shift larger portions of company expertise to build processes and applications that move the business forward.

• On-demand Access, availability of managed automated infrastructure and services options, Cloud service providers offer something called a platform as a service (subscription-based service). Organizations don’t have to manage the infrastructure and for some services pay only as per usage or demand.

• Scalability, organizations can scale up or down instantly due to the availability of on demand Cloud services. IT systems can be accessed on a need-to-basis via a subscription service. Because it is virtualized, scaling up your systems can be done quickly and efficiently, resulting in less downtime.

• Reduced downtime, when hardware fails, organizations usually have to wait for a repair, which reduces both staff and business productivity. The cloud system is dependent on many servers and data centers; if one area fails, other hardware resources can pick up the slack.

Infrastructure modernization is the foundation for digital transformation for many organizations. The transformation journey should ideally begin with the development of key capabilities to modernize their IT infrastructure, such as virtual machines, containerization, and serverless computing.

Modernization Using Virtualization

Virtualization is the creation of a virtual — rather than actual — version of an operating system (OS), a server, a storage device or network resources.

To create a virtual system, virtualization employs software that simulates hardware functionality. This practice enables IT organizations to run multiple operating systems, multiple virtual systems, and a variety of applications on a single server. Greater efficiencies and economies of scale are among the benefits of virtualization.

Operating system virtualization is the use of software to allow a piece of hardware to run multiple operating system images at the same time, allowing administrators to avoid wasting costly processing power.

The advantages of using a virtualized environment are numerous, lower costs, easier disaster recovery, quicker backups, easier testing, improved productivity, easier migration to the cloud, lack of vendor dependency, and better for the environment.

Virtualization capabilities can be built in six areas of IT. Namely,

1. Network Virtualization
2. Storage Virtualization
3. Server Virtualization
4. Data Virtualization
5. Desktop Virtualization
6. Application Virtualization

Modernization Using Containerization

Containerization is a versatile technology with a wide range of applications in IT. Containerization improves DevOps efficiency by accelerating deployment, streamlining workflows, and reducing infrastructure conflicts when used correctly. It also enables IT teams to make better use of the resources at their disposal. Containers can be configured to use virtually all available computing resources while consuming almost no overhead.

If virtual machines are the primary compute option for infrastructure modernization. The second type is containers, which operate on the same principles as virtual machines. They provide isolated environments for running software and optimizing resources from a single piece of hardware. There are, however, more efficient virtual machines that recreate a complete representation of the hardware. Containers, on the other hand, only recreate or virtualize operating systems. This means that they only contain what is required for the specific application that they support. Containers offer a far more lightweight unit for developers and IT operations teams to work with and provide a range of benefits. Containers allow IT teams to create predictable environments that are isolated from other obligations because they start faster and use a fraction of the memory required to boot an entire operating system.

Every day, IT teams find new ways to use containerization to solve problems. There are numerous ways to use containerization, and each application will most likely produce unique benefits. The following are some of the most common reasons why IT teams choose to containerize:

• Portability
• Efficiency
• Agility
• Faster Delivery
• Improved Security
• Faster App Startup
• Easier Management
• Flexibility

Modernization Using Server Less Computing

Serverless computing is an extension of cloud computing in that it also uses the concept of the cloud to provide services, but with a slightly different strategy and use case.

Serverless delegates all management responsibility for backend cloud infrastructure and operations tasks, provisioning, scheduling, scaling, and patching to the cloud provider. This gives IT teams more time to work on developing and optimizing front-end application code and business logic.

Unlike cloud computing, which is a pay-as-you-go service, serverless computing is a subscription-based service. With serverless, organizations never pay for idle capacity. They pay only for the resources required to run their applications, and only when those applications are running.

In comparison to traditional cloud-based or server-centric infrastructure, serverless computing has several advantages. Serverless architectures provide greater scalability, greater flexibility, and faster time to release for many IT teams all at a lower cost. IT teams no longer have to worry about purchasing, provisioning, and managing backend servers with serverless architectures.

Virtualization, containerizations, and serverless computing all allow IT teams to build applications with far less overhead and greater flexibility than traditional server architecture. However, the architecture style that an IT team should use is determined by the business requirements, legacy integration limitations, application needs, timeline, and cost of adapting new digital technologies.

Conclusion

Modernizing IT infrastructure opens a world of possibilities, allowing organizations to increase the speed with which they bring new ideas to fruition, both customer-facing and internal. Furthermore, for many organizations, the ultimate goal is growth. The ability to move forward, generate more revenue, compete, and otherwise thrive is critical to ongoing operations. To accomplish this successfully, organizations must be able to adapt and grow both physically and technologically. Businesses require IT infrastructure solutions that can accommodate fluctuating needs, which almost always means cloud computing.