The accumulated technical debt within the data centre has reached a point where supportability and agility have become compromised.
Systems have been migrated time and time again, with complex integrations resulting in platforms that are difficult to manage, and have ever-increasing dependencies.
Consequently, IT departments struggle to provide the services the business requires, in the way employees want to consume. Additionally; potentially aging infrastructure, legacy operating systems and software and constricted scales impede on this too.
Organisation adjustments - including acquisitions, mergers, disposals and rapid growth, along with poorly managed change programmes, can lead to data centre and network services being partially silo’d. This also result in duplication of services and processes throughout the infrastructure. A fragmented environment creates a reactive IT department - rather than productive.
Business and compliance teams are demanding more functionality and security features from IT such as self-service applications and processes, granular reporting on users and systems, more demanding regulation (including GDPR), improved SLAs and shorter development windows - all with the same, or reduced, budgets. This cannot be achieved without a modernised and optimised data centre.
Steps to Achieving the Modern Data Centre
Whether you are operating out of an on premise server room, a third party data centre or a cloud service provider - or perhaps a combination of all three - ensuring that you can rely upon modern networking, storage, compute, security, backup, disaster recovery and management platforms is essential.
Ultima has developed tactical and strategic data centre-related engagements, aimed at helping organisations to understand with the challenges presented by modern business operations and practices.
- Data Centre Optimisation - Our methodology assesses the current level of maturity - across hybrid IT, protection and security, and modern applications. We then identify a desired state and build a gap analysis highlighting the areas of people, process and technology you need to invest in for better alignment with your emerging business requirements.
- Unified Storage - Different workloads require varying features and storage profiles, however multiple storage platforms each delivering point solutions for specific workloads (e.g. VDI or analytics) can provide better return on investment. We can guide you through the storage options available - from traditional and disruptive, through converged, hyper converged and software defined - including cloud-based systems.
- Unified Management - Regardless of your exposure to Azure Operations Management Suite (OMS), Ultima can help you exploit its benefits - including a business justification demo and review, setting you up on the correct subscription model and functionality deployment. Gain a truly unified management platform comprised of Insight & Analytics, Automation & Control, Security & Compliance, and Protection & Recovery - using Azure OMS.
- Cloud Data Centre - Utilising the broad portolio of services from Microsoft and AWS, we can provide a clear path to the cloud. This will help you understnad which workloads can migrate, alongside the transition approach to Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) through our Cloud Data Centre Offering:
- Cloud Developer Services - Delivered as an Advisory Service, our team use a tried and tested approach to interrogate your current operating model - while identifying the prerequisite steps and investments needed to develop a successful DevOps strategy.
- Application Architecture - Following your data centre modernisation project, or as part of, we work with you to plan the implementation of each service you require - in the cloud. This offering will design each application to ensure it is highly available and scales well in a cloud-compute environment. We also look to introduce modern cloud components to reduce costs, or improve the service.
Ultima’s Modern Data Centre services encompass the above, and more. We recognise that, as organisations evolve, IT needs to pace by continually offering robust, protected, efficient and highly scalable services to their employees, customer and partners - without being a blocker to growth and innovation.
- By Matt Hudson (Solutions Architect)
