Convergence is the Future of IT

In recent years, the business need for speed and agility sent IT sprawling to the shadowy periphery of the enterprise and into the clouds beyond its perimeter as consumerization trumped centralization as the dominant IT model within most organizations.

Consumerization enabled the business to directly purchase technology solutions from external service providers for tactical projects while IT was busy supporting ongoing business operations. Cloud-based services made it easy for the business to accomplish short-term goals. However, it also made it easy for the business to forget that the virtual resources of the cloud still had to be grounded in a physical infrastructure, which had to be managed either by IT directly or via a service level agreement with an external provider. With IT spending most of their time and budget trying to make sure everything worked well together, the business was forced to continue to look elsewhere to cost-effectively and quickly fulfill new requirements. Over time, the lack of a long-term cohesive strategy created a splintered IT landscape lacking interoperability and mired in complexity and costs.

This is why today the IT budgets of many organizations are stretched to their breaking point. While it is not practical for the enterprise to snap IT consumerization back to IT centralization, it is time for an IT convergence. With cloud computing, mobility, big data, and security converging into the perfect storm of IT challenges, the evolution of a new IT infrastructure is required.

This is driving the business need for IT to deliver a converged infrastructure that builds a shared-services model bringing all server, storage, and networking resources together into a common pool on a common platform. A converged infrastructure unifies management tools, policies, and processes so that resources and applications can be managed in a holistic, integrated fashion. This convergence is designed to simplify IT as well as align IT with the speed of business for any workload at any scale.

Research by Forrester and HP reveals 88% of enterprises already have or are planning to implement a converged infrastructure, citing a number of tangible business benefits including:

• Reduces operational costs, redundant systems, and data security risks
• Increases speed and agility with the scalability to grow as business needs change
• Reduces application downtime and provides better disaster recovery
• Enables faster IT deployment times accelerating time to market, time to value, and the pace of innovation
• Improves IT responsiveness by providing the ability to shift resources from maintenance to new initiatives
• Reinvents IT as an innovation engine for business growth as opposed to simply a technology integrator

This post is brought to you by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP’s Make It Matter.