Infrastructure modernization can help businesses achieve the operational agility and scalability they need to thrive in today’s market. This effort also helps reduce maintenance costs and paves the way for organizations that want to adopt artificial intelligence.
To ensure success, IT leaders must first ask themselves: Are we aligning our infrastructure with business goals? Do we have the right technology stack to support both current and future needs? And, how can we ensure that all hybrid workloads are secure? By answering these critical questions, organizations can ensure their modernization efforts have a lasting impact.
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1. What Is My Technical Debt? What Technology Is Outdated?
No modernization effort is one-size-fits-all. But whatever the desired outcome, assessing technical debt is a must. According to IDC, 83% percent of enterprises are rationalizing their current tech stack. An expert assessment can help IT leaders identify any technology that is underused or redundant. Once these inefficiencies are identified, teams may be able to deprovision old applications and reallocate funds to new technologies.
Technical debt accounts for about 40% of IT costs, according to McKinsey. Too often businesses face overly complex tech stacks “after years of building quick workarounds and one-off solutions to favor speed over good design for the long term,” McKinsey notes.
Technical debt is not only a barrier to modernization but also a financial drain, costing companies more money than expected with overdue upgrades and hardware refreshes. IT managers facing this dilemma should calculate the cost of maintaining versus retiring or refactoring the solution.
40%
The percentage of their budget that IT leaders put toward technical debt
Source: mckinsey.com, “Breaking technical debt’s vicious cycle to modernize your business,” April 25, 2023
2. What New Upgrades Are Essential to My Future IT Strategy?
Before investing in new technologies that may lack interoperability, IT leaders need a well-planned hybrid cloud strategy that balances the distribution of workloads on-premises and in the cloud.
“The problem we often see is that organizations don’t anticipate disruption. Budget cuts, strategic shifts, changes in leadership — these all interfere with and shift the scope of modernization goals,” says Matt Cobb, a solution architect team lead at CDW. “As a result, organizations end up with competing projects, which is an out-of-alignment business strategy.”
Working with a tech partner can help IT leaders map out this strategy. If an organization’s modernization effort is about cost-cutting, start by rightsizing cloud investments. If the focus is automation, consider hyperconverged infrastructure solutions or high-processing power hardware that can handle generative AI algorithms and graphics processing units.
DISCOVER: Why hybrid cloud ended the infrastructure debate for good.
3. What Enhanced Security Measures Should Be Added?
IT leaders also need to make sure that all workloads — both on-premises and in the cloud — are secure. Consistent performance is crucial for user satisfaction and operational efficiency. Monitoring tools, network optimization techniques and fine-tuning performance with observability tools can ensure that all systems are running smoothly.
Implementing zero-trust and IAM strategies can also help protect data across all environments and make it easier to adhere to compliance and privacy laws. IT leaders can also adopt a continuous threat monitoring approach to proactively prevent potential threats.
By following these questions, IT leaders position themselves for greater success. “Done correctly, infrastructure modernization can help businesses achieve scalability, agility and the resilience necessary to thrive in the data-driven landscape of the future,” says Cobb.
UP NEXT: Experts say IT modernization may ultimately be a cost savings.
