Should IT Infrastructure be in your Top 3 business priority?

Historically, IT Infrastructure has been viewed as a “cost center” and IT Operations “a necessary evil” because significant human and financial capital expenditures have been required to maintain a functional system.  Over the last few years, middle market companies are beginning to realize that IT infrastructure can be used as a competitive advantage. It needs to be a top business priority and we have found that most middle market leadership teams struggle with how to effectively move from a necessary evil to a competitive advantage.

Transforming your IT Infrastructure is a critical part of your go forward strategy. IT must be viewed as a profit centre providing transparency into the data needed to make split second business decisions, increase corporate efficiency overall and generate incremental revenues.  

The exponentially changing demands for “glocalization” (global yet local) and “personalized experience,” for “usability” and “aesthetics,” for “choices,” and the “I need it now” syndrome is driving every business in every industry to think “business outcomes” in terms of “variety”, “velocity”, “value” and “volumes” on-demand.  Focusing on IT strategies that deliver business outcomes is the first step in transformation.

For your business to transform, your IT infrastructure needs to transform as well. Why?

• You cannot scale-on-demand without a cloud strategy.
• You cannot perform big data analytics without high performing infrastructure.
• You cannot deliver mobile-first strategies with only traditional enterprise IT network and without a broadband/wireless connectivity strategy.
• You can no longer keep thinking Single Sign-On for your end users, therefore a federated identity and access management becomes critical.
• Almost certainly, your existing network and datacentres were not designed for tomorrow.
• You do not have even a few days to recover from a disaster. Therefore, your business continuity strategy cannot be de-prioritized anymore.

Are some of the questions that you are grappling with listed below?

• Have we made serious investments in our current IT infrastructure? Are we maximizing the value derived from it? Therefore, do we need to preserve the investments?
• Do we have an opportunity to reduce the number of data centres and capital expenditures? Can we bring it down by 40%-60%? If so, how and by when?
• Are our cooling and electrical costs almost 50% of TCO? Can we reduce it?
• Have we invested in tools, licenses, servers and storage that are sparingly used?
• Have we done some serious virtualization? Do we have a good cloud strategy?
• Does our enterprise network need a redesign?
• Is our IT able to stay in step with the business as the market demands?
• Have we built our core compute and network infrastructure with real-time
• What has been our trend of spend on IT operations? Is there opportunity to reduce it by 25%-50%?
• business continuity in perspective? Did we ever test it? Can we really recover from a serious outage in quick time?

 If you don’t know the answers to these questions, a quick low cost assessment can provide you with critical insight into the state of your business’s IT infrastructure and help you develop a strategy to align your IT investments and infrastructure with the desired business outcome. Group50’s Digital Technology Practice brings specialized IT infrastructure consulting expertise and can perform an objective analysis of your current state and future needs to help you develop a strategic IT infrastructure roadmap that emphasizes on maximizing ROI and establish the base for transforming your business.

If you are interested in reading more about this subject you can go here to see a list of articles written by Group50’s Digital Technology Experts.

To find out more about how Group50 can help you make IT infrastructure a top business priority and transform it from a cost center to a profit center, send us an email at info@group50.com, request more information here, or contact the head of our Digital Technology Practice, Shirish Nene, at snene@group50.com or call at 703-201-3936  

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