How successful IT leaders approach agility and ability to scale

Innovations such as cloud services, lean-agile software development, and direct-to-consumer communications removed barriers to entry, changed the business landscape, increased competition, and significantly reduced risk and investments for first movers.

These changes require organizations to innovate, change, and respond quickly to survive and thrive. This means IT must also deliver promptly and change quickly so the business can move faster than it previously did. Speed has become crucial to take advantage of new opportunities before they disappear. Flexibility to increase, decrease, or cease efforts and expenses based on the most recent data and circumstances has also become equally important.

These new business demands challenge the traditionally longer IT lifecycles for investment, procurement, development, deployment, data center, and hardware refreshes. The traditional IT model no longer works when the business requires quicker delivery and faster responses.

To meet business demands today, IT organizations must act with agility—the ability to act quickly and deliver new services promptly; and scalability—the ability to increase or decrease capabilities efficiently as the business requires. IT organizations are responding with multiple approaches, including: decreasing on-premise, owned data centers, hardware purchasing, and unnecessary software development, increasing third-party contracted services, SaaS subscriptions, cloud subscriptions and services, DevOps, modernization, and contracts that have built-in flexibility for quickly scaling to meet fast-changing business needs.

How to address three common challenges around agility and scalability

“I need agile IT solutions to quickly and seamlessly meet new business requirements.”

IT leaders rely on the agility of their deployments to meet new business needs quickly and seamlessly. The speed and ease with which an organization can react to new demands are critical to success. Hybrid IT strategies that can connect data center space, cloud resources, and hyper-scale on-ramps allow companies to quickly create and integrate new services and tools or move workloads with flexing business requirements. Connectivity also supports this agility, enabling organizations to connect core data centers, edge deployments, and clouds.

“I need to scale resources up and down to keep pace with rapidly changing demand.”

IT leaders need the ability to quickly and efficiently scale IT resources, corresponding infrastructure, and data center footprints to address continually evolving business needs. You must utilize data centers, cloud resources, and connectivity options for seamless scalability. In addition, it’s important to work with a provider that allows you to reallocate contracted dollars between its products and services to protect your IT investments as you adapt your IT solutions.

“Our infrastructure is aging and requires significant investments. How do I optimize short-term costs and limit long-term investments?”

Infrastructure ages, requiring IT leaders to invest in new data center equipment. Many are moving away from an owned infrastructure model in favor of an OpEx strategy. It is possible to avoid costly capital expenditures and long-term commitments while modernizing your IT infrastructure. With outsourced hybrid IT solutions, you can achieve the security, performance, and data protection your organization needs, across various workloads and connections, with predictable costs and flexible contract terms. Work with a provider that has a professional services team that offers experience and expertise to help your IT organization architect and transform into a cost-effective, modern IT landscape.

FlexAnywhere Solutions for complex hybrid IT environments

The rapid-fire pace of business requires companies to quickly pivot and scale to address changing business landscapes and end-user demands. Flexential provides organizations with the ability to adapt and respond in an agile, real-time manner. FlexAnywhere® Solutions provides best practices for accelerating the deployment of hybrid IT solutions, improving availability, infrastructure performance, and interconnection reliability to public clouds, partners and customers.

Flexential can help you solve your challenges around agility and the ability to scale your IT solutions here.