Large enterprises face increasing pressure to modernize IT infrastructure while juggling cost efficiencies and talent constraints. Why not wait and see?
The demand for compute capacity is increasing exponentially worldwide. Scaling out compute, data, and AI workloads has never been more important.
At the same time, IT leaders are under continual pressure to reduce costs. As a result, many IT leaders are accelerating their modernization efforts and transitioning to more performant, efficient and cost-effective solutions.
If nothing is broken at the moment, is it wise to modernize with constraint and not undertake major infrastructural transformations until all the technology kinks are ironed out? Well, technological competition (no matter how unpredictable and volatile) waits for no enterprise, unfortunately.
To gather an informed perspective, DigiconAsia.net interviewed Madhu Rangarajan, Corporate Vice President (Server Solutions Group), AMD, for his take of the modernization landscape.
DigiconAsia: What is the main reason why some enterprises are slow to modernize IT infrastructure and adapt to new/expanded workloads and use cases?
Madhu Rangarajan (MR): In large enterprises the process of migrating and re-platforming existing digital business workloads can be complex.
Many organizations fear possible business disruption and question whether the choice to invest in new systems to support applications that are currently working really makes sense.
Unfortunately, if applications are left untouched for too long, they can become brittle and hard to integrate. Even finding staff to maintain them can become problematic.
DigiconAsia: How can enterprises determine the right time to modernize their IT infrastructure?
MR: Undertaking modernization projects is a strategic choice. Modernization can improve business efficiency, increase engineering productivity, and accelerate innovation and even reduce cost at the same time.
In all such efforts, alignment with the business objectives of the organization is critical. Understanding the nature of the workloads and business processes helps drive value. The ability for IT to be a trusted partner is the deeper alignment that drives successful execution. For all such projects:
- The first step is careful evaluation of the available platforms. The key is to benchmark a representative set of applications that can provide success metrics from Proof-of-Concept (POC) that can reliably represent production scale outcomes.
- IT leaders need to ensure that the Return on Investment during the POC stage is multi-fold. First, they need to look for benchmark performance: significant improvement in performance is essential. Next, application specific performance benefits should be considered. This, coupled with better scaling and operational efficiencies can inform them on whether to add newer use cases within the same cost footprint.
- Equally important for businesses, IT leaders must assess the ability of the compute platform to enable long-term innovation. They need reasonable confidence that they will receive significant year-on-year performance gains, as well as better scaling with a lower power footprint.
DigiconAsia: What challenges and risks should enterprises anticipate when modernizing their IT infrastructure?
