The Transition out of the Pandemic — What now for the IT industry?

In my last blog, Predicting the Unpredictable, I spoke about the huge changes the COVID-19 pandemic had wrought on us all and IT’s response to it. I referred to the remote working ​‘pendulum’ and how, whilst it would swing back, it wouldn’t return to ​‘normal’ pre-pandemic levels. I believe we are now in this phase, well at least those of us who are fortunate enough to live in the developed world. Alas, for our friends in the developing world the path will be bumpier and longer, unfortunately.

We are already seeing the stock market react to this, the large tech companies’ previously high flying valuations have started to come down. More ​‘conventional’ companies such as brick-and-mortar retailers, hospitality and travel providers are rising as more in-person activity is anticipated.

True, this is not such earth-shattering news as such, but it does underline that the world will return to how things were. Things will not be identical to before and companies need more than ever to be agile to keep pace with accelerating change. Critical to their success, businesses and industries must ensure their IT infrastructure is flexible, scalable and adaptable; supporting the continued digital transformation with speed.

“77% of executives state that their technology architecture is becoming very critical to the overall success of their organisation”.

According to a recent Accenture survey ​“77% of executives state that their technology architecture is becoming very critical to the overall success of their organisation”. A percentage no doubt increased given the experiences IT decision-makers (ITDMs) have been through of late. And now is the time to ensure their IT is ​‘future focused’, building resilience into the business through cost optimised, agile and scalable infrastructure.

Whether current IT infrastructure is situated on-premise, in the public cloud or hybrid cloud (on-prem plus cloud components), a key focus should be on cost optimisation. Thereby allowing increased focus on new business value creation.

Cost optimisation involves reducing time spent managing and maintaining systems as well as ensuring any new investment is flexible and can scale easily with their business growth.

For on-premises IT, Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is being increasingly deployed for the very reasons of reduced management and increased scalability. There are a variety of offerings from players such as Nutanix, VMware and Microsoft, supported by leading hardware OEMs. 

Additional flexibility is now available for on-premises deployments in the form of as-a-Service (aaS) offerings. These provide ​‘cloud-like economics’ for on-premises infrastructure, e.g. pay-per-use, whereby a customer pays for infrastructure depending on how much it is utilised. The more you use, the more you pay, the less you use, the less you pay. These can potentially offer the best of both worlds, compelling cloud like financials whilst retaining the control, performance and security of on-premises infrastructure.

For those utilising the public cloud, there are several ways to ensure that costs are optimised. The major cloud providers have tools to help you optimise costs. These include consolidating and refactoring workloads to take advantage of the cloud rather than just ​‘lift and shift’ of existing workloads. Monitoring utilisation of reserved compute instances and storage. Using spot instances rather than reserved if appropriate.