EDITOR’S COMMENT
Building tomorrow’s
digital enterprises
Yesterday’s enterprises cannot be merely transformed to
prepare themselves for the digital era, they need to rebuilt,
explains Deepak Narain at VMware.
Deepak Narain, Director Systems Engineering
MENA, VMware.
D
igitalisation is not coming – it is
already here. Across all sectors,
organisations are looking at how
they can go digital as they adapt to new
business models, whether it is the sharing
economy, multi-sided markets, data-sharing
platforms or on-demand ecosystems.
According to IDC, 50% of the Global
2000, Forbes’ comprehensive annual
ranking of the world’s largest public
companies, will see most of their
business depend on their ability to create
digitally-enhanced products, services and
experiences by 2020.
Research from Gartner found that CIOs
expect digital revenues to grow from 16%
to 37% in the next five years, so saying you
need to be digital and being digital are
going to be two very different things. For
legacy players, successful transformation
means overcoming several obstacles;
namely being agile, secure, able to scale
and deliver cost efficiencies.
To be agile means meeting the
demands of end-users – both customers
and employees – to innovate and deliver
in days rather than months in the pursuit
of delivering a superior experience. For
established, global enterprises with
multiple layers of approval, this requires a
complete unpicking of systems, processes
and, in many cases, culture.
Having the ability to scale means
adapting to the new norm: IT no
longer happens within the silo of
the IT department. It now touches
every department and every aspect of
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operations, as the Internet has brought
easy, low-cost access to applications and
services by all. Finally, this all needs to
be achieved while finding ways to reduce
operational IT costs to reinvest into
digital innovation.
Ideally, these new business models
need to be built using the right materials
for the job, and that goes all the way back
to the right foundations. Retrofitting
something originally designed to deliver
an analogue way of working is only going
to take an organisation so far.
Most organisations will need to
come up with a compromise, ensuring
they secure the value of what already
exists, without impacting on what it can
deliver now and in the future. Whichever
approach is taken – renovation or
rebuild – it requires foundations, or an
infrastructure, that allows an organisation
to be agile, that keeps mission critical data
secure, that is scalable and cost efficient.
Agility, security, scalability and cost-
effectiveness are some of the hallmarks of
the various cloud computing environments
available. Talked about for years, cloud is
now at a point where organisations have
a multitude of options and providers to
choose from.
This is reflected in their approach to IT;
just 10% of US and Europe enterprises are
reluctant to use cloud computing for new
applications for IT projects, according to a
report by 451 Research, commissioned by
VMware and Atos. Elsewhere, Gartner has
stated that by 2020 a corporate no-cloud
policy will be as rare as a no-Internet
policy is today.
The appetite for cloud is growing, along
with the understanding that it can be the
foundation on which to overcome the
barriers to digital transformation. Recent
research shows that increasing agility and
enhancing scalability for demand were
among the top three drivers for planned
cloud projects. The report also found
that almost 48% of enterprises moving
applications into the private cloud, do so
for security and control reasons.
That said, there is no such thing as
a perfect solution. The proliferation of
cloud computing has given rise to different
environments which, if not managed
correctly, can be no more suited to
delivering new business models than the
on-premise legacy infrastructure they are
replacing. 70% of organisations are using
private, public and hybrid clouds to take
advantage of the benefits and restrictions,
that applications needing different
environments can use depending on their
use and requirements.
The key is planning the implementation
properly. For that, IT needs to work
with lines of business to identify and
prioritise requirements, whether speed
to market, cost efficiency, testing and
development or regulatory compliance.
This should result in the right mix of
environments being deployed to deliver an
infrastructure which meets the needs of
the organisation’s digital transformation
both today and for tomorrow.
Issue 15
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS