The demand for change

Today organizations face different challenges in the market to stay relevant. The biggest move was clearly introduced by smartphones and tablets. It was not just a computer in a smaller device, they changed the way IT is delivered and consumed by end users. These devices proved that it can be simple to consume and install applications. Just search in an app store, choose what you like, use it as long as you like it. If you do not need it any longer, simply remove it. All with very simplistic commands and easy to use gestures.

More and more people relying on IT services by using a smartphone as their terminal to almost everything. These devices created a demand for fast and easy application and service delivery. So in a way, smartphones have not only transformed the whole mobile market, they also transformed how modern applications and services are delivered from organizations to their customers.

Although it would be quite unfair to compare a large enterprise data center with an app store or enterprise service delivery with any app installs on a mobile device, there are startups and industries, which rely solely on the smartphone as their target for services, such as Uber or WhatsApp.

On the other side, smartphone apps also introduce a whole new way of delivering IT services, since any company never knows how many people will use the app simultaneously. But in the backend, they still have to use web servers and databases to continuously provide content and data for these apps.

This also introduces a new value model for all other companies. People start to judge a company by the quality of their smartphone apps available. Also, people started to migrate to companies which might offer better smartphone integration as the previous one used. This is not bound to a single industry, but affects a broad spectrum of industries today such as the financial industry, car manufacturers, insurance groups, and even food retailers, just to name a few.

A classic data center structure might not be ideal for quick and seamless service delivery. These architectures are created by projects to serve a particular use case for a couple of years. An example of this bigger application environments is web server farms, traditional SAP environments, or a data warehouse.

Traditionally these were designed with an assumption about their growth and use. Special project teams have set them up across the data center pillars, as shown in the following figure. Typically, those project teams separate after such the application environment has been completed.

All these pillars in the data center are required to work together, but every one of them also needs to mind their own business. Mostly those different divisions also have their own processes which then may integrate into a data center wide process. There was a good reason to structure a data center in this way, the simple fact that nobody can be an expert in every discipline. Companies started to create groups to operate certain areas in a data center, each building their own expertise for their own subject.

This was evolving and became the most applied model for IT operations within organizations. Many, if not all, bigger organizations have adopted this approach and people build their careers on these definitions. It served IT well for decades and ensured that each party was adding its best knowledge to any given project.

However, this setup has one flaw, it has not been designed for massive change and scale. The bigger these divisions get, the slower they can react to request from other groups in the data center. This introduces a bi-directional issue, since all groups may grow at a similar rate, the overall service delivery time might also increase exponentially.

Unfortunately, this also introduces a cost factor when it comes to service deployments across these pillars. Each new service, an organization might introduce or develop, will require each area of IT to contribute. Traditionally, this is done by human handovers from one department to the other.

Each of these handovers will delay the overall project time or service delivery time, which is also often referred to as time to market. It reflects the needed time interval from the request of a new service to its actual delivery. It is important to mention that this is a level of complexity every modern organization has to deal with when it comes to application deployment today.

The difference between organizations might be in the size of the separate units, but the principle is always the same. Most organizations try to bring their overall service delivery time down to be quicker and more agile. This is often related to business reasons as well as IT cost reasons.

In some organizations, the time to deliver a brand new service from request to final roll out may take 90 working days. This means a requestor might wait 18 weeks or more than four and a half month from requesting a new business service to its actual delivery. Do not forget that this reflects the complete service delivery, over all groups until it is ready for production. Also, after these 90 days, the requirement of the original request might have changed which would lead into repeating the entire process.

Often a quicker time to market is driven by the lines of business (LOB) owners to respond to a competitor in the market, who might already deliver their services faster. This means that today's IT has changed from a pure internal service provider to a business enabler supporting its organization to fight the competition with advanced and innovative services.

While this introduces a great chance to the IT department to enable and support their organizations business, it also introduces a threat at the same time. If the internal IT struggles to deliver what the business is asking for, it may lead to leverage shadow IT within the organization.

The term shadow IT describes a situation where either the LOBs of an organization or its application developers have grown so disappointed with the internal IT delivery times, that they actually use an external provider for their requirements. This behavior is not agreed with the IT security and can lead to heavy business or legal troubles.

This happens more often than one might expect, and it can be as simple as putting some internal files on a public cloud storage provider. These services grant quick results. It is as simple as Register-Download-Use. They are very quick in enrolling new users and sometimes provide a limited use for free. The developer or business owner might not even be aware that there is something non-compliant going on while using these services.

So besides the business demand for a quicker service delivery and the security aspect, an organization's IT department has now also the pressure of staying relevant. But SDDC can provide much more value to the IT than just staying relevant.

The automated data center will be an enabler for innovation and trust and introduce a new era of IT delivery. It can not only provide faster service delivery to the business, it can also enable new services or offerings to help the whole organization being innovative for their customers or partners.