Management

Why IT Complexity Is Not Always a Problem

Complex IT environments are a fact of modern business. The goal should be to eliminate needless complications without sacrificing capabilities.

Ryan Petersen

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Ryan has been a magazine and newspaper editor for 21 years, with the last 15 covering a variety of bases for CDW’s family of tech magazines. As Editor in Chief, he works on developing editorial strategy and is always on the lookout for new writing talent and sharing great stories with the IT world. In his spare time, Ryan enjoys spending time with his family, biking and obsessively following Iowa Hawkeye sports and Cubs baseball.

There’s a paradox to be found in modern technology: As the world marches forward, IT environments necessarily become more complex. And while that creates challenges, it is worth remembering that complexity is often a byproduct of progress.

So, as organizations strive to simplify their environments, their goal should be to trim the fat — removing needless complications that don’t add value — while retaining their ability to be creative, flexible and responsive.

For example, it’s clear that operating on multiple cloud platforms delivers many advantages for businesses, as each platform constantly seeks to outdo its rivals with new capabilities and services.

Still, the desire to simplify leads many businesses — realizing that multicloud environments can be a bit messy when not carefully-managed — to embrace just one while forsaking the others.

LEARN MORE: Why IT asset management is vital to successful digital work.

IT complexity should be managed, Not eliminated

Sporttrade chose to manage complexity without sacrificing flexibility (see “The Tools Businesses Use to Manage Workloads on Multiple Clouds”). It adopted a VMware solution that allows it to see all cloud usage in one place, complete with dashboards that break down spending, security and governance. “It’s been great for baselining rough estimates of what our cloud computing needs will be,” says Sporttrade IT Manager Natalie Lloyd.

LEARN MORE: How value stream management can benefit IT leaders.

As the cloud has offered more options, corporate networks have gotten more sophisticated too. That’s why good, ongoing network monitoring has never been more important. North American Savings Bank is getting that monitoring as a service from CDW, giving leaders peace of mind while retaining its network’s full capabilities (see “With Services and Solutions, Companies Have Choices for Network Monitoring”). “If we wanted to do this on our own, we would be faced with building our own monitoring system, building our own staff and training that staff,” says Jay Duthler, the bank’s vice president of technology infrastructure.

These organizations recognize that complexity is a facet of a sophisticated IT environment and have wisely sought the expert help they need to manage it carefully.

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