Is composable infrastructure the right choice for your IT environment? The following are 5 key questions that can help you begin to explore the capabilities of composable infrastructure and its applicability within your own IT environment.
Start with The Business Case for Composable Infrastructure
1. Is IT holding your business back?
To compete successfully in today's fast-paced business environment requires agile compute solutions designed with speed and accuracy in mind. If you find that your legacy IT solutions are holding you back from becoming a digitally enabled competitor, yet you still need those legacy apps from time to time, a composable infrastructure may provide the best of both worlds.
2. Are you fighting a battle with stranded assets?
One of the most common problems CIOs face is over- or under-buying of infrastructure to support the business' fluctuating demands. Most err on the side of caution and over-buy, which leaves them with too many stranded assets on the balance sheet – and an uncomfortable meeting with the CFO when explanations are required. Because a composable infrastructure creates a pool of resources that are automatically configured as the business' compute needs change, there is no need for over-provisioning, something which puts CIOs and CFOs on the same side of the table.
3. Do you develop your own applications in house?
To avoid over- or under-provisioning during the DevOps process, organizations that are developing their own business-building apps in house are often asked to use hand-me-down legacy infrastructures for development and quality assurance, then switch to another more agile environment for production where resources can be carefully allocated and monitored by IT staff; the use of two environments, however, often slows the entire process. Optimally, to make the most of advanced DevOps tools, internal developers need the ability to control and rapidly model their own application environment without having to hit the "pause" button and rely on IT to allocate resources for them. Because a composable infrastructure's resources are pooled, they can be both shared as services and allocated without IT intervention, which makes a composable infrastructure uniquely positioned to meet the DevOps needs of internal application development teams.
4. Are you making the best use of your IT talent?
Nearly everyone in IT today has at least talked about the 80/20 principle – the fact that nearly 80 percent of IT pros' time is spent on mundane "lights on" activities and only 20 percent on more valuable business-building projects. While the goal has long been to flip those percentages upside down, this has proven to be easier said than done. The kind of automation and orchestration built into composable infrastructure solutions, however, may finally make this possible, allowing your most talented IT professionals to refocus their efforts on more strategic and creative activities.
5. Is your current infrastructure future ready?
As copper wire nears its maximum capacity, a light is being shined on the science of photonics, technology slated to be the replacement for copper wire in the not-too-distant future. Instead of transporting gigabits of information, with photonics, computing systems will need to be ready to handle terabits of data, something a composable infrastructure is already equipped to do. So, while there's no such thing as a future-proof environment, there is such thing as one that can be future ready, and a composable infrastructure may be the first step in that direction.