“I feel the need…. the need for speed.”
IT departments have become conservative. Why? In an age where business is so reliant on technology and infrastructure, it’s not surprising that that CIOs will not take risks on new innovation without a cast iron proof of concept.
I get it. With business critical responsibilities around ensuring data and business security resting on their shoulders, there is so much at stake. It is no wonder that IT decision makers opt for technology that is familiar – the ‘comfortable slippers’ options, if you will.
The problem with this is that inertia sets in and this mentality of not rocking the boat means that IT Departments have become obsessed by lock down and change control, fueled by the fear that someone might end up looking bad. But what if this approach was blind-folding you to future solutions that could revolutionize the business and make you look like a rock star?
Wrapping yourself in a security blanket is all well and good but the fact is that IT decision makers cannot face the changing world by clinging on to what they know. Markets change and as facilitators of business infrastructure they have a responsibility to be on top of new disruptive technology that may just offer them a solution to some of the biggest challenges that businesses face.
As an example, we all know that data has become the lifeblood of a business. The huge quantities of data generated by enterprises potentially offers security, insight, and competitive advantage. That is of course as long as your infrastructure is well equipped to deal with the ever-increasing volumes. What’s more, it is becoming clear that the value of this data is directly determined by the speed at which you can move, analyze and deploy it. Those responsible for business data are living with the pressure to deliver a strategy that is underpinned by the knowledge that yesterday’s data is already out of date.
We’ve known for a while that the world has moved on. You are not alone in grappling with huge quantities of data that is growing by the day and, what’s more, you are also acutely aware that the type of data that makes up these rapidly increasing volumes, has also changed. With more and more video, images, compressed, deduped and encrypted data the fact is, this type of data is even harder to move quickly to where we need it.
Historically, IT decision makers have diligently thrown everything in their toolkit to try to solve this problem. They have taken a tried and tested approach and have invested in upgraded versions of the same solution to try to keep up with the data deluge that is descending.
Problem is, have you noticed that despite the added investment, your latency issues and transfer speeds are not improving? It’s time to start looking at the issue in a different way and to do this, I’m afraid you are going to have to look outside what you already know and trust.
The uncomfortable fact is that if you don’t this leaves a business exposed in a world where the battle is on to operate at speed, with agility and at scale. Why?
Speed = the ability to reduce operational time
Scale = the ability to manage the volume of data against the business service expectations
Agility = the ability keep up with today’s the service levels, IT has got to move faster to cope with growth
Let’s put this in to context. Would you drag race your top fuel dragster on gas from the local gas station? Seems a crazy question, this is not a discussion of if the car is working, it is a question of it not being able to meet the task required of it.
This is what we are doing every day, expecting our data to miraculously move at high speed over our WAN’s without the right fuel.
The good news is that new technology is already on the market – such as Bridgeworks – that acts as the Nitromethane in this scenario. This technology eliminates the need to rip and replace your existing infrastructure, and is designed to look at the problem in a different way, simply optimizing what you already have.
The only real risk in committing to testing out these new technologies through a proof of concept, is a 3-hour investment of your time. Imagine if the result of that investment of time was saving you over a third off your remote backup/replication time or indeed the majority of your data movement time. And just think what that would do for your service level agreements.
The takeaway from this is CIOs should not be afraid to test out new technologies (however maverick they might sound) as the perceived risks are not as risky as you think.
After all it is riskier not to get more operational optimization than it is to stay with the status quo. We dare you to be the hero, the Maverick, the non-conformist, because we all “feel the need… the need for speed”.
