Technology-enabled paths towards business success: What do you see as your most immediate business priorities? As hard as it may be to imagine, there is a path that will take you there. Successfully arriving at the end of that path is a matter of recognising your goal, committing to stay the course and, today, deploying a technology solution that can help give you every advantage available.

1. Unlock hidden capacity
   
   Are you getting the most out of your IT infrastructure? When facing the challenge of supporting expanding and changing workloads, you should have more options than simply investing in and installing new servers and storage. New demand shouldn’t always equal new hardware and the answer to your capacity needs might be as simple as having an infrastructure that is flexible enough to let you tap the underutilised resources you have already invested in.
   
   The need: Step back to assess your existing resources and you’ll almost certainly identify opportunities to eliminate redundancies and unlock underutilised resources. The truth is, if you are not getting enough bang out of your IT buck, your infrastructure might be part of the problem. Luckily, it can also be part of the solution. New technologies such as open standards, logical partitioning and virtualisation open up vast new potential for workload consolidation.
2. Manage capacity
   
   The only thing worse than throwing away money on infrastructure you don’t need is not being able to meet the IT demands of your business. Addressing changing market conditions by quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively managing shifting demand across available IT resources is essential.
   
   The need: Current IT technology offers every business the ability to deploy an IT environment that is uniquely adapted to their way of doing business. The question is, how to keep your infrastructure as well suited on day 1,000 as it was on day 1? For that you must be able to manage and reconfigure server, storage and application capacity across your network to meet the specific demands of business conditions that can vary widely from day-to-day and minute-to-minute. And finally, you need to do it without incurring the high-cost of a large team to manage it all.
3. Rapid deployment
   
   When you are deciding whether or not to pursue a new business opportunity or implement a new way to improve service to your customers, one of the first questions you face is whether your current infrastructure can support the applications and processes that the change entails.
   
   The need: The truth is, it can be easier to think something new than it is to marshal an organisation’s disparate, often siloed systems to act as one in pursuit of a common goal. Integrating new applications, custom applications or packaged off-the-shelf applications with existing infrastructure can be a complex and time-consuming process. And, of course, trying anything new can be an added strain on IT resources that are already stretched thin.
4. Compliance
   
   The only thing constant about the regulatory environment is change. In the marketplace, companies that keep pace with this change - preserving the trust of customers, partner and investors - without incurring undue cost or disruption to business operations will have a distinct advantage over those that can’t. Compliance therefore, requires not simply that you conform to one particular set of standards but rather that you stay prepared to meet different standards from one year to the next as the environment changes and internal controls are updated.
   
   The need: This can put a considerable burden on information systems that may already be stretched thin. Changing requirements about how private information must be kept or how accessible it must be demands equally fluid data storage and accessibility capabilities. This may necessitate the introduction of support for completely new applications and the enabling of new functionality, all of which must be integrated into your existing operational and storage systems.
5. Business continuity
   
   The challenges, expectations and opportunities of today’s business environment have led many companies to move towards the model of a perimeter-less enterprise. While enhancing your ability to compete and adapt to changing conditions this transformation can also increase certain risks and vulnerabilities. Increased customer access, for instance, raises the importance and complexity of protecting against threats like customer identity fraud. This demands a strategy to manage identities, protect data, and secure networks and transactions and an infrastructure that can help protect itself. Each new IT opportunity and benefit brings its own potential risks to security -- risks that must be continually managed, monitored and audited without losing sight of the costs.
   
   The need: What is needed is a comprehensive approach to managing security risk - one that includes IT security governance policies, security process & controls management and systems that help protect themselves. What’s at stake is not merely data and network security but the potential for loss of business, reputation, and competitive advantage. Your security is an IT issue and a brand trust issue. To protect your vital infrastructure from deliberate or accidental damage your approach must be one that integrates security capabilities into your infrastructure rather than addresses these challenges after the fact.

Add to: del.icio.us | Digg