Here Are The Three New Age Ingredients For IT Transformation

Enterprises today are enjoying massive opportunities that the digital age has presented to them. However, only those who can successfully navigate digital transformation have the potential to keep up with the global competition. India has a growing appetite for technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), big data, that are transforming the way business is done, helping enterprises to meet customer demands efficiently, with speed and agility.

As per a ResearchAndMarkets forecast report, the Indian digital transformation market is predicted to generate a revenue of $710.0 billion by 2024, progressing at a CAGR of 74.7% during the forecast period (2019-2024).

To stay at the forefront of innovation and to keep up with customer expectations, enterprises across industries are adapting and transforming their IT strategy. From renewing their organisational structure to implementing new technologies and enhancing infrastructure, enterprises are continuously searching for ways to improve agility and efficiency.

As business pioneers, how can we ensure successful IT transformation? The solution has three key ingredients: DevOps, Containers and Software-Defined Infrastructure.

DevOps: Collaboration, Automation and Continuous Delivery

DevOps is changing the world of software development and deployment with its ability to break down barriers between development and operations – teams that have so far operated in silos. The key aspect here is the integration between software developers and operations professionals to work in closer collaboration, helping to construct and deploy applications in a faster, more cost-effective and more reliable manner.

The conjoining of development and operations teams can accelerate the deployment of new functionality, bringing ideas to market sooner and with greater frequency.

For example, Facebook was one of the earliest adopters of DevOps, the approach enabled the tech giant to constantly develop, upgrade, integrate, and test its applications rapidly. Serving over 2 billion users globally, DevOps has been an essential tool in helping Facebook meet customer expectations and improve customer experiences.

The Indian software market is expected to grow at a rate of 14.1% year on year, according to IDC’s latest Asia Pacific Semi-Annual Software Tracker. Enterprises looking to be more responsive to their customers’ needs should adopt DevOps practices to align internal collaboration between their software development processes with their business objectives and customers’ requirements.

Containers: Faster, Flexible And Fluffier

Virtual machines have been instrumental to software deployment for the past two decades, and containers are now taking virtualization to a higher level of efficiency. These are self-contained and isolated environments that include everything which the code enclosed within requires to run independently.

Simply put, enterprises can break an application down into independent, loosely coupled features that can be delivered faster, updated more frequently and run with the use of containers. As more and more software is deployed as containers, we are starting to see “container sprawl” in the same way that we saw “server sprawl” and “VM sprawl” happen in the past. This has led to the need to manage containers effectively.

Kubernetes has quickly become the preferred container management system across the world and CIOs consider it best for handling clusters of containers, especially when it comes to supporting DevOps within businesses. Kubernetes combines application containers into logical ‘packages’ for simpler, faster management and discovery.

It also automates the deployment and scaling of containerised applications even across multiple physical servers. Businesses can leverage packaged Kubernetes platforms that can run either on-premise or in the cloud, or both. This enables enterprises to deliver software products and services faster, more frequently and at-scale.

According to another market survey report, 56% of Indian IT leaders are already employing containers. Yet another research reveals that 27% of organizations already run containerised applications and another 44% plan on incorporating them over the next year.

Software-Defined Data Centres (SDDC)

Software-Defined Infrastructure (SDI) is expected to go vogue soon. As per Markets&Markets, software-defined data centre market will grow at a CAGR of 23.6% by 2023. Traditional data centres that were built using hardware architectures are outdated, too rigid and have high latency rate while responding to the needs of dynamic modern applications. SDI, on the other hand, focuses on software innovation, offering more flexible and responsive data centre architecture.

Compute, networking and storage capacity is provided in dynamic, easy-use pools of resources, which can be quickly deployed and easily managed, based on the needs of the workplace or the users. IT teams now have freed up resources to focus more on creating and managing new IT capabilities and services.

From start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, there is a growing questioning of the value of expensive proprietary hardware for tasks that now have a software-defined alternative. Enterprises can make huge savings on costs associated with the administrative tasks of setting up and managing systems, due to the advanced functionality and automation being delivered by SDI software on commodity hardware.

Achieving IT Nirvana

Achieving IT transformation successfully involves business strategy, processes, tools, people, investments and a wide range of other factors. However, it takes more than simply knowing what must be done.

Research shows that DevOps, containers and SDI/SDDC are interlocked as critical elements in the transformation strategy for most enterprises. All three have been in existence for some time now: cloud computing and SDI are in their second decade, and DevOps began in 2008.

The ingredients are all there, but the true success for IT lies in how efficiently businesses leverage the potential these technologies offer in combination.

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