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In a recent article, we discussed the connection between digital transformation, innovation, and rising IT complexity. And we noted that complexity presents a big challenge to cybersecurity teams. Nevertheless, organizations have armed themselves with a litany of best-of-breed tools to tackle their most pressing security challenges. Many large enterprises use upwards of 40 to 50 tools — all best-of-breed point solutions. This is tool proliferation in the extreme — popularly known as “tool sprawl.”

Bradley Schaufenbuel, the CISO of Paychex, a provider of payroll services for small businesses, says “tool sprawl” has become a major concern for IT and security teams. His own team finds new vulnerabilities from rogue software every day. If that software is not regularly updated, the attack surface grows exponentially.

“Unless the tools are sanctioned and inventoried, security teams are often unaware of their existence,” explains Schaufenbuel. “And a security team cannot secure what it doesn’t know exists.”

They cannot secure it; they cannot effectively manage it; and they cannot control the spiraling costs of maintaining a mismatched portfolio of security tools with overlapping capabilities.

Security tools can breed insecurity

The great irony of all of this complexity is that the very tools designed to protect the security of an organization may present the greatest cybersecurity threat, as the well-publicized SolarWinds hack highlighted in 2021. 

Many CIOs admit the tools in their security portfolio lack integration. According to an IBM study, this creates added cost and even more complexity, which ends up hindering an organization’s ability to detect and respond to breaches.

Moreover, problems with security tool sprawl don’t necessarily begin with IT departments. Instead, many security tools are one-time freeware installations by employees self-servicing their machines. But problems arise when licenses requiring corporations to pay for those applications kick in and block the use of the programs. Few users go the extra mile to actually remove them, creating additional potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

“Most security teams with dozens of tools will admit they don’t really know how well they’re working,” comments Chris Hughes, cybersecurity consultant, and university lecturer. “They’re spending a lot on these tools but can’t tell you if they’re getting value out of them. And that’s money they could have shifted to other resources, like bolstering their teams.”

Cost-effective security: certainty without complexity

In principle, companies invest in multiple tools because they have complementary capabilities, and the benefits they produce when assembled are greater than the sum of their parts. But Mark Settle, a former CIO for Okta and BMC Software, believes it often doesn’t work out that way. 

“In practice, tools may have overlapping capabilities, be difficult to administer, and come with underlying security vulnerabilities,” Settle notes.

So, how can IT operations and security teams tame tool sprawl, while reducing costs and protecting their organizations against the multitude of threats that circle them like hungry sharks?

One approach for organizations looking to counter tool sprawl and reduce costs is to deploy a single, authorized platform to handle multiple functions. This can streamline operations and improve security while also eliminating the attraction of shadow IT and rogue software solutions.

A unified platform can cut the cost of running, managing, and maintaining multiple security tools, while:

Improving the ability to cost-effectively meet tightening global regulatory and compliance mandates.

Addressing the pressure to make the right bets strategically when it comes to tooling and security practices.

Deploying patches automatically with greater efficiency.

Reducing the attack surface in the face of trends such as a growing remote workforce.

Meeting the renewal demands of cyber-insurance carriers for stricter mean time to patch and mean time to repair standards.

Consolidating tools without compromising security.

Simplifying the discovery, management, and protection of all assets with the IT estate.

Of course, abandoning tool sprawl for a platform approach, while sensible, will require buy-in from multiple stakeholders. In the meantime, here are three interim steps to improve security:

Scrutinize tool spending. Once an organization has a handle on tools, it needs to evaluate its investment in them. Technologists can become so obsessed with buying the latest and greatest tools they overlook the other tools they’ve already invested in. “Some of the CISOs I know challenge their teams to identify an existing tool that they’re willing to give up before approving the purchase of a new product or service,” says Settle. “That can be a highly effective way of limiting the sprawl.”

Inventory endpoints and software. Schaufenbuel’s team at Paychex did this as part of a larger effort to rationalize tool spending and consolidate its vendors. Some organizations will already have workflow or comprehensive endpoint management platforms deployed to help accomplish this. Also, look for anomalies as part of the process, not just knowing everything that’s installed on a network but also what seems to be installed in a more limited fashion — and why.

Strengthen access. It’s incredibly difficult to accurately assess what’s on a network if devices are not registered. Schaufenbuel recommends giving users an amnesty period to register tools so they can be continually hardened and updated, and if that doesn’t work, aggressively blocking or removing unsanctioned tools from company systems. “If a tool is legitimately useful, insist that it go through a vetting process to become sanctioned,” Schaufenbuel suggests.

Tanium’s Converged Endpoint Management (XEM) platform provides a significant return on investment. For example, ABB Americas’ estimated ROI of its investment in Tanium is $1.75 million.  

Learn more about the benefits of Tanium’s XEM platform and the cost savings it can bring to your organization by signing up for a Tanium ROI report.

Digital Transformation

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Digital transformation has changed how businesses operate, making them more agile and responsive to the markets they serve. But this transformation has come at a cost: a rambling web of software tools and applications, cloud infrastructures, and decentralized application services. And this complexity presents a big challenge to IT teams.

In tandem with digital transformation initiatives has been the rise of the remote workforce, making traditional network perimeters a thing of the past. Many IT resources now operate outside the corporate firewall and are vulnerable to cyber threats of all kinds. The result? A much larger and more varied attack surface.

Tackling complexity and the security risks it presents

As complexity has taken hold, IT organizations have armed themselves with a litany of best-of-breed tools to tackle their most pressing security challenges. A Forrester survey found that on average, organizations today use 20 or more tools from more than 10 vendors to secure and operate their environment. Many large enterprises use upwards of 40 to 50 tools — all best-of-breed point solutions. This is tool proliferation in the extreme.

A best-of-breed approach works — if it delivers the results an organization is looking for. However, when organizations suffer from outage after outage and critical vulnerabilities and patches go unresolved for months, the merits of a best-of-breed approach come into question.

Many CIOs believe the sheer number of tools in their organization limits — not enhances — the effectiveness of security and IT operations. But for most security teams, the best-of-breed approach has been the only option available.

The tyranny of best of breed

Twenty years ago, IT management solutions came as legacy platforms. They provided unified functionality, and their architectures for monitoring and acting on the environment worked under the relatively limited requirements of that era.

However, around 15 years ago, rapid changes in computing (advanced threats, increasing scale, IaaS, virtualization, remote work, cloud) drove requirements in functionality and coverage those platforms could not adequately deliver.

Enter the best-of-breed approach. Enterprises were forced to start buying point solutions to address the gaps, and every nuanced need, every new desired feature, and every response to changes in the environment bred its own tool requirement with several vendor options.

But best of breed has several drawbacks. Each tool offers different visibility and different data. Tools are often expensive to deploy, learn, and upgrade. They’re often not extensible to accommodate changes over time, so they have short shelf lives.

Tool consolidation — the return of the platform approach

To address tool proliferation, IT leaders need to step back, set all their tools and biases aside for a moment, and perform a tool audit:

Identify the results and capabilities your organization needs to deliver regardless of tools and technology.

Go through each tool individually and catalog the capabilities it provides.

Create a Venn diagram to see where overlap exists between these tools. The overlaps are your opportunities for consolidation.

This audit will help inventory your current state and start the process of tool consolidation via a platform approach.

With unified security operations platform, CIOs, CISOs, and CTOs can:

Monitor and optimize software needs to reduce unnecessary spending.

Eliminate legacy solutions and reduce unnecessary point tools and the infrastructure required to support them.

Unify endpoint management and security onto a single console.

Rally your IT teams around instant, accurate, and actionable data to maximize efficiency and minimize risk.

Proactively monitor and resolve end-user performance issues to lessen the burden on IT support resources.

Reduce mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) and the number of tickets to improve workplace productivity.

Improve IT decision-making around critical software change initiatives.

Smartly manage hardware lifecycles using historical data to assess the need for hardware refreshes.

Looking ahead

Remote work trends are here to stay. The need to manage and secure all types of endpoints (in and out of network) will only increase. So, it’s clear that with a distributed workforce, IT teams will continue managing and protecting endpoints physically outside corporate firewalls. A converged platform that yields visibility, control, and trustworthy data to IT teams will only grow more critical in a hybrid work environment.

A converged platform can deliver measurable results, such as

Reclaiming assets, eliminating point tools, and modernizing IT to reduce costs.

Increasing team efficiency by offering an accurate set of data and tools to boost performance and improve decision-making.

Gaining greater visibility and control across teams to mitigate potential IT outages and their associated costs.

Learn more about the benefits of Tanium’s Converged Endpoint Management (XEM) platform and the cost savings it can bring to your organization by signing up for a Tanium ROI report.

Security

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Over the past two decades, cloud computing has evolved from a method that utilized extra data center capacity to the mission-critical infrastructure across enterprises that we see today. But along the way, the transformation and dramatic growth of the cloud have created increasingly complex, multi-account, and multi-region environments that can hinder, rather than accelerate, a company’s ability to deploy and manage globally connected networks.

Enterprise IT groups struggling with this complexity can transform their environments through new cloud-based networking architectures that stress simplicity across multi-environment connections, while also providing additional flexibility that can help reduce overall costs.

“Enterprises should be able to move anything, anywhere, at any time, for any reason,” says Robert DeWeese, Chief Cloud Architect of Next Generation Network & Edge Computing at Kyndryl. “This includes the ability to treat the network as a roadmap for adopting new features and technologies, so that when something new comes along, you can take advantage of it.”

DeWeese says that the complexity issues around multi-cloud and multi-region environments first surfaced when enterprises began creating multiple accounts for their cloud projects and then had to figure out how to effectively connect those accounts.

“They often had to do a complex workaround of networking, VPNs, and other components to make the infrastructure work,” he says. AWS, recognizing the growing complexity, has continued to build out its connectivity services. In 2018 it launched AWS Transit Gateway, the first big evolution in cloud networking. “Transit Gateway changed the game, enabling you to connect one account to another without a complex set of workarounds to bring traffic back to one data center just to go back into another account, or connect a VPN from one account to another,” says DeWeese.

More recently, AWS developed AWS Cloud WAN, which sits on top of Transit Gateway and makes it easier to build, manage, and monitor a global network that connects resources running across cloud and on-premises environments.

“Cloud WAN is different than older technologies in that it’s a managed service,” says Puneet Chopra, Global Domain Leader, Enterprise Networks, SDN and Cloud Based Networking with Kyndryl. The Cloud WAN service delivers three main capabilities to enterprises: automation, orchestration, and agility, which combine to reduce go-to-market times.”

“Now enterprises have a single point of control from where they can configure multiple VPC networks through a drop-down policy, the logic of which via APIs is built in the Cloud WAN, saving immense time,” says Chopra. 

Kyndryl’s Network and Edge Practice has certified and skilled technology experts who can help configure Cloud WAN and Transit Gateway to meet client needs, along with business experts who can provide guidance on the business model to deliver better ROI. “That ROI perspective is important because CIOs and CFOs are often making these purchase decisions together,” says Chopra.

Eliminating the need for complex workarounds

Additional Cloud WAN benefits include:

A single, unified, global point of control that lets users configure an entire network from one network policyA centralized dashboard, monitoring and event bus that shows physical and logical topologiesBuilt-in automation that lets users define their own routing, propagation, and attachment mapping that defines segment relationships through policyAutomatic network creation by AWS (through peering and dynamic routing) based on AWS Region definitions in a core network policy.

Together, Transit Gateway and Cloud WAN give organizations more flexibility in their cloud environments by eliminating the need for complex workarounds. These advances can help organizations simplify their end-to-end connectivity infrastructure to improve speed to execution – which benefits all aspects of the business.

It’s important to work with a trusted partner to configure and deploy the services properly. Learn more about how Kyndryl and AWS are innovating to achieve transformational business outcomes for customers.

WAN

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Over the last decade, many organizations have turned to cloud technologies on their journey to become a digital business. The advantages of multi-cloud are well-documented: efficiency, flexibility, speed, agility, and more. Yet without consistent, comprehensive management across all clouds – private, hybrid, public, and even edge – the intended benefits of multi-cloud adoption may backfire. Increasingly, multi-cloud operations have become a priority for organizations to successfully negotiate cloud adoption.

Today, not only are competitors more aggressive and margins tighter, but partners, customers, and employees also have higher expectations and greater demands. As organizations continue to adapt and accelerate service delivery, they need to look to modern management solutions to simplify and speed  access to the infrastructure and application services teams need, when they need them – without increasing business risk. By deploying solutions that offer comprehensive capabilities with a common control plane, organizations can unify their multi-cloud operations to improve infrastructure and application performance, gain visibility into costs, and reduce configuration and operational risks.

Multi-Cloud Management Challenges

Almost every digital business today faces the issue of complexity when it comes to managing its multi-cloud operations. As organizations have moved away from managing single data centers to managing hybrid and native public clouds, the scope and scale of management have exploded into countless moving parts. Organizations can face complexity due to siloed infrastructure, user access policies, multiple APIs, billing, and lack of a formal operations plan that ensures processes and security remain consistent across multiple clouds.

With so many moving parts, organizations can also face siloed teams that in many cases have to contend with different cloud constructs, including different definitions of the infrastructure services provided by those clouds and different policies for security and compliance. In addition, teams often deploy different tools to manage their various clouds. A fragmented approach to operational priorities for cloud services makes it difficult to get a holistic view of how an organization uses cloud services, shares best practices, and ensures sufficient governance. Not only can disconnected operations impede an organization’s ability to run efficiently, but also impact their ability to troubleshoot problems and recover from outages quickly. Siloed teams and the sprawl of management solutions can also result in a lack of visibility into cloud costs.

As we enter an uncertain market in 2023, organizations face increasing pressure to control their cloud spending. Complexity is the enemy of cost optimization. As a result of different pricing structures across different cloud provider services and siloed teams, organizations are often struggling to predict future spend. In fact, according to a recent VMware study, more than 41% of organizations want to optimize their existing use of cloud to save on costs.

The Benefits of Unifying Multi-Cloud Operations

As organizations mature in their multi-cloud management strategies, they increasingly recognize that success depends on having comprehensive visibility. Organizations cannot manage what they can’t see. Although management solutions have been around for a very long time, comprehensive visibility has yet to be fully appreciated or achieved by businesses.

Cloud management powers your cloud operating model by helping you manage, control, and secure your cloud environments. A unified approach to multi-cloud management enables consistent and seamless operations across clouds, simplifying cloud adoption, streamlining app migrations, and accelerating modernization. An effective, efficient cloud operating model today requires a modern management solution such as VMware Aria. By bringing together a comprehensive visual map of multi-cloud environments with actionable management insights, VMware Aria enables organizations to leverage end-to-end intelligent operations across clouds to improve performance, lower costs and reduce risk.

As we enter a year of uncertainty, agility is the key to resilience and growth, and no matter where organizations are at in their cloud journey, a cloud operating model rolled out with modern, comprehensive, multi-cloud management solutions will bring consistency and efficiency to managing all types of clouds. More importantly, it will allow business leaders to quickly adapt, respond, and innovate on the fly which will prove critical to staying competitive.

To learn more, visit us here.

Cloud Computing

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By Andy Nallappan, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Software Business Operations, Broadcom Software

The information technology that enables scientific and commercial breakthroughs, from precision medicine to digital transformation, demonstrates tech’s boundless potential to improve our world. Yet, tech practitioners have long traded progress for increased complexity.

IT complexity, seen in spiraling IT infrastructure costs, multi-cloud frameworks that require larger teams of software engineers, the proliferation of data capture and analytics, and overlapping cybersecurity applications, is the hallmark—and also the bane—of the modern enterprise.

With a better understanding of IT complexity, large enterprises can partner with their strategic vendors to reduce IT complexity and drive more innovation and business success from it.

Complexity Continues to Increase

Complexity exhausts IT budgets and workers—a widespread problem that worsened during the pandemic. Seventy percent of executives say that IT complexity has been a growing challenge for their organization over the past two years, according to Broadcom Software-sponsored research by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services. While 85% of executives state that reducing IT complexity is an organizational priority, only 27% said their company had managed it effectively.

Regarding complexity, David Linthicum, managing director and chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte Consulting LLP, comments that “over the last five years, people have been migrating to the cloud and using more complex distributed deployments, such as multi-cloud, edge computing, IoT, and things like that.”

The Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report Taming IT Complexity through Effective Strategies and Partnerships discusses the root causes of IT complexity and the penalties organizations pay for failing to undertake an effective complexity-reduction strategy. In the report, Linthicum describes multi-cloud as “the straw that broke the camel’s back” because rather than centralize all enterprise data in a single cloud, companies are expanding their investments in multiple areas and trying to stitch all the pieces together.

Seeking Solutions to IT Complexity    

Not all IT solutions work as intended. A recurring problem known as “legacy spaghetti” occurs when IT teams layer on new technology solutions “that are disparate, siloed, and unorganized,” according to the report.

Nearly two-thirds of executives in the study indicate that incompatible systems and technologies are the top factors fueling IT complexity. Not surprisingly, 67% of respondents said employees are frustrated or confused by persistent complexity, with three-in-five noting that it costs money and creates unnecessary additional work.

Though complexity has plagued data centers since the days of mainframes and punch cards, the study indicates that:

82% of executives view IT complexity as an impediment to success.81% believe that reducing it creates a competitive advantage.73% agree that IT complexity is an organizational expense.36% of respondents say that reducing complexity in security creates more resilient systems—less vulnerable to security breaches.

At long last, the tide may be turning. According to the study, most organizations have developed specific strategies to reduce IT complexity and create operational efficiency. While there are many steps a company can take to minimize complexity, starting with simpler tools, enterprises can also partner with firms that specialize in complexity reduction to boost IT agility. In the study, three-in-five executives agree that working with a trusted partner is key to reducing complexity.

The report does point out, however, that all complexity is not bad. Innovation is the cornerstone of success for nearly all companies today. But innovation can require a certain level of complexity, meaning that ongoing innovation requires continual attention to the complexity it inevitably will create. “Executing innovation initiatives at scale involves risk-reward calculations all along the journey because there will be missteps and even failures. Innovation initiatives almost always require individuals with diverse expertise and experience, including from outside the organization, to collaborate and experiment together,” says Linda Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, where she is also chair of the Leadership Initiative. “The more complex whatever you’re trying to do, by definition, the riskier it is.”

“A partner might have done this dozens of times with several other companies, and so we learn from that and ask, ‘What were lessons learned, and how can we accelerate quick-win improvements?’” said Jason Duigou, CIO of Indianapolis-based Medxcel, a healthcare facilities services company, in the Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report.

Nine Ways to Improve IT Complexity

The report also highlights nine practices to enable firms to improve the way they manage IT complexity:

Develop a common language around IT complexity—identifying a project’s complexity risk helps firms prioritize resources better.Find a balance between innovation and complexity—too much customization creates burdens, adds costs, and spikes risk.Take a modular approach to transformation—tackle new features incrementally to reduce stress on legacy systems.Get the C-suite on board—the study indicates that not all senior executives understand the weight of the problem. Complexity reduction needs funding and executive support.Retire redundant technologies—phasing out incompatible systems and redundant technologies is the most common complexity-reduction program, according to the study.Connect systems and increase compatibility—API-first strategies can help reduce the complexity of connecting disparate applications and improve system interoperability.Train employees—organizations that excel at reducing complexity tend to train their employees to promote better utilization of existing tools and systems.Create feedback loops—mitigating complexity starts with listening to how customers and employees experience a service or product. Feedback can help eliminate unnecessary features that lead to unwanted complexity.Develop metrics and measure progress, but see things through—measuring progress against objectives and appropriate peer groups can help improve IT complexity reduction efforts.

The report points out that there are no easy or inexpensive ways to reduce IT complexity. Companies that stand out as leaders in this effort tend to focus on limiting rather than trying to halt the constant march of complexity. Download the Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report now to learn more.

About Andy Nallappan:

Broadcom Software

Andy is the Chief Technology Officer and Head of Software Business Operations for Broadcom Software. He oversees the DevOps, SaaS Platform & Operations, and Marketing for the software business divisions within Broadcom.

IT Leadership

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Based in Italy and with more than 20 years of experience helping enterprises, from large international firms to emerging mid-sized operations, grow their businesses with technology, WIIT serves a rapidly expanding and diverse customer base. With a full portfolio that includes an extensive array of cloud offerings – including private, public, and hybrid cloud services – the company is well-known for its track record of success in helping organizations realize the full potential of the cloud while bypassing the complexity often associated with large-scale digital transformations.

Serving leaders in the energy, fashion, financial services, food, healthcare, manufacturing, media, pharmaceutical, professional services, retail, and telecommunications industries, WIIT works with organizations that have stringent business continuity needs, mission-critical applications, and crucial data security and sovereignty requirements. Customers draw on the company’s full suite of solutions which includes everything from digital collaboration tools, a full cybersecurity stack, extensive software development services, and innovations that let customers embrace the Internet of Things.

We recently caught up with Alessandro Cozzi, founder and CEO of WIIT to learn about the company, what he’s seeing in its burgeoning cloud business, and what he feels will be the next big thing. We also took the opportunity to learn why it was important to achieve the VMware Cloud Verified distinction, not just for WIIT, but the companies it serves in Italy, Germany, and around the globe.

“The traditional IT model is no longer sustainable,” says Cozzi. “Often the most value of the cloud lies in hybrid architectures that for the vast majority of enterprises are complex to design and manage. We offer a platform that secures and optimizes the full mix of disparate infrastructure, from edge computing to public cloud, that many organizations need. We also govern it with specialized expertise, certifications, and top-tier proprietary assets that enable us to exceed the most demanding service level agreements.”

Notably, WIIT offers a highly customized Premium Cloud that is uniquely tailored to each organization, a Premium Private offering for critical applications, and a Public Cloud that offers seamless connectivity to Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. The company’s Premium Multicloud services enable customers to combine elements of each to best address their needs.

Cozzi notes that WIIT’s Premium Private Cloud ensures extremely high levels of security, scalability, and data reliability, while the public clouds are complimentary especially for applications that aren’t critical. He also points out that hyperscalers are becoming specialized, prompting more companies to rely on services from different cloud providers.

“The hybrid cloud is often the answer when there is a need to host systems in more than one location for international processes, regulatory needs, network latency, data sovereignty, or application requirements,” he adds. “At WIIT we engineer, implement, and govern custom hybrid cloud and multi-cloud models in conjunction with the complex IT architectures our customers need. And we make the most of the unique capabilities of different clouds and data centers to ensure that our clients can continually evolve their businesses.”

Cozzi stresses that VMware’s trusted technologies and new innovations play a pivotal role in these efforts. It’s what led the company to achieve the VMware Cloud Verified distinction.

“WIIT is among the most innovative cloud solutions and service providers in Europe,” he says. “Most of our customers rely on VMware technologies for critical services. Showing that we have deep expertise with them is yet another way that we provide peace of mind and a serene cloud journey.”

Not surprisingly, Cozzi only sees cloud adoption increasing in light of customers’ success in growing their businesses with the cloud and the new capabilities a flexible, hybrid approach makes possible.

“It gives me great pride that today we’re able to remove so much of the complexity involved in even the largest, most involved cloud deployments so that customers simply experience the full potential of the cloud,” says Cozzi. “But I’m also really excited about the innovations we are seeing in the world of applications and the advancements in cloud microservices now taking shape. The impact of the cloud will only increase.  We’re intent to grow a business that continues to offer customers secure and innovative cloud services that recognize not only people, but also the environment, as a strategic priority.  Ultimately, we are committed to being a key player not just in the realm of digital transformations, but also in just and sustainable transitions of infrastructure and the businesses processes and practices it is used for.”    

Learn more about WIIT and its partnership with VMware here.

Cloud Management, IT Leadership, VMware

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Companies are angling for the pay-per-use pricing, scalability, and flexibility advantages of public cloud, yet not every application or workload is a fit for the paradigm. Enter the Advizex/HPE GreenLake partnership, which tackles hybrid IT challenges by replicating the cloud experience wherever workloads are running and without the typical operational complexities.

With the HPE GreenLake platform, customers don’t have to make a wholesale commitment to public cloud or invest in costly on-premises infrastructure. Instead, they gain a consistent simplified hybrid cloud experience wherever applications and workloads reside: in a data center, at the edge, in colocation facilities, or in a public cloud. HPE and Advizex deliver the benefits of both worlds, enabling businesses to scale faster, hit digital transformation targets quicker, achieve better economics, and simplify IT.

“Companies don’t want to spend capital — they want to manage resources based on OpEx and manage that OpEx tightly,” explains Joe VanPatten, vice president of cloud consumption for Advizex, a longtime partner of HPE. “It’s a great time for customers to reduce up-front capital outlay and using a solution like HPE GreenLake lets them consume hardware as they need it, gaining more of it as they need to grow.”

The HPE GreenLake platform affords companies the pay-per-use economics of public cloud based on actual metered usage, providing full visibility across the entire IT estate through a single unified portal. Integrated consumption analytics manages usage and IT spend against reserved capacity, predicting spikes and automating capacity planning, based on historical usage and trends.

HPE GreenLake can be provisioned quickly with preconfigured blueprints or, alternatively, can be customized easily. Advizex offers an array of managed services for organizations that want to free up internal IT from routine maintenance and operations work so it can concentrate on higher-value business initiatives.

Advizex and HPE have a 30-year history of helping customers achieve their IT modernization and digital transformation goals across multiple industry segments. Bolstered by more than 100 HPE certifications, the Advizex team has a proven track record of introducing HPE technologies to market.

Still, the integrator takes an agnostic approach, working with customers through planning, ordering, installation, and launch to bring in the relevant platforms and services that will enhance the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform and consumption model. Advizex advisers help clients understand their business needs; facilitate alignment among stakeholders; and develop a complete solution, including building a strong business case.

“As a partner that’s agnostic about products, we don’t talk about the OEM — we talk about consumption and infrastructure as a service,” Van Patten explains. “We pick a portfolio of products that can be bundled together in a way that’s most valuable to our customers.”

W.R. Grace & Co., a $2 billion global specialty chemical manufacturing company, is one of those customers. It turned to Advizex and HPE GreenLake to modernize its IT infrastructure in the face of pandemic challenges, to harmonize systems and processes from past mergers and acquisitions and to enable a more agile response to customers’ needs. The shift to HPE GreenLake made it easy to scale workloads up and down and enabled IT to deliver for business users in minutes rather than months, according to Srini Vanga, W.R. Grace’s vice president and head of IT.

The journey to cloud can be confusing and complex, but with the right Advizex and HPE GreenLake road map, organizations can anticipate a much smoother path to hybrid IT.

Learn more at https://hpe.advizex.com/greenlake/.

Hybrid Cloud

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Increasing adoption of digital technologies are making apps inevitable in our everyday life. Apps are pivotal in enabling companies to innovate and gain a competitive edge in digital interactions, from social selling to data-driven marketing.

“With customers gaining control over the way companies deliver experiences, enterprises must provide new customer experiences to meet and exceed customer demands. From a technology perspective, this means having an agile and flexible IT environment,” said Paul Chik, Hong Kong Solution Leader at Kyndryl.

To keep up with customers’ evolving expectations and competition in the marketplace, modernisation of legacy apps, from user facing to mission-critical systems, empowers businesses to stay ahead of the competition. Companies can anchor on a basic framework based on the integration of a cloud adoption strategy with DevSecOps for agile delivery of services and customer experience or the modernisation of legacy apps for a seamless multi-channel experience.

Enterprises should also understand that modernising apps is not an all-or-nothing transformation approach. Decisions on which and how apps are modernised should be aligned with business objectives, with a strategy to integrate systems into the wider enterprise IT estate, which is becoming increasingly hybrid.

App modernisation continues to rise in priority. According to IDC’s Q4 2021 Application Services Survey, 51% of APAC organisations rate app modernisation as a high or top priority today; in three years, it will be a high or top priority for 88% of APAC organisations. A separate study echoes this finding: nearly half or 45% of APAC CIOs are currently focused on modernising infrastructure and apps for this year, higher than their US and EMEA counterparts, according to Foundry’s annual State of the CIO study.

Pathway to app modernisation

A successful app modernisation initiative ensures cost savings and improvement in efficiency and customer experience. Instead of a one-size-fits-all, a strategic approach to app modernisation is essential to avoid pitfalls throughout the process.

More importantly, it helps companies protect their traditional assets and maximise the benefits of cloud, a key enabler in enterprise digital transformation journey. Based on Kyndryl’s experience with customers across different industries, a typical cloud migration and modernisation strategy comprises:

Planning: This early-on assessment and planning is critical. Enterprises need to decide how to place the right workload in the right platform. Simply lift-and-shift from on-premises to cloud could increase overall cloud spending. Through app discovery and dependency mapping, we can compile the overall modernisation strategy and decide whether any particular application should be lift-and-shift, re-platformed, or re-architected. A wave plan could then be developed to put modernisation to work.Modernising: This is a process of up-versioning an organisation’s existing apps to meet cloud requirements. This stage involves the conversion of the apps’ source code to be cloud ready with operational testing and integration of an agile DevSecOps for security. Security is essential for an app environment and needs to be integrated early-on as it can minimise the risk of hacking and fraud when they are deployed.Operating: This phase focuses on app testing, deployment, and hybrid cloud platform management, ensuring legacy and cloud-native apps sit on a single platform to enable integrated operational agility.

While this makes up a typical modernisation framework, Chik cautioned that different organisations might embark on a whole different journey.

Kyndryl

“Each enterprise has its own objectives and is at different stages of the transformation journey. It is important to have a purpose-built strategy, create an enterprise architectural blueprint and governance model according to your business needs,” he added.

IT leaders everywhere are acutely familiar with the complexity and immense effort required of a cloud migration and modernisation journey. Chik outlined some best practices to smoothen and fast track the process:

Employ a container approach to modernisation for agility benefits and TCO savings. Container platforms have become an integral part of the hybrid and multi-cloud landscape, helping companies to accelerate multi-cloud adoption and infrastructure cost optimisation, speeding up the deployment of apps, and increasing the availability of apps. Legacy apps would be modernised to microservice-based architecture and run on containers to become cloud-native.Embrace DevSecOps. Security remains top of mind for IT leaders, given the increasing sophistication of the threat landscape. Integrating security helps minimise risk for container contents and its interactions from the start, while embracing its culture of continuous improvement for learnings and operation management.Collaborate with service providers to expedite cloud migration and modernisation and ensure seamless hybrid cloud integration. Enterprises can leverage the provider’s technology and industry knowhow, local and global expertise, as well as deep partnerships with leading cloud hyperscalers and technology ecosystem.

“While IT needs to be efficient from Day 0 to Day 2, service providers can offer a global delivery model and use cloud native tooling to drive operations and cost efficiencies based on CloudOps and DevSecOps. It’s also important that the service provider takes on a lifecycle approach to ensure success and continuous improvement in every stage of the transformation journey,” Chik added.

App modernisation improves business agility by helping companies scale faster, improve time to market, and reduce IT operating cost. A partner with a deep understanding of the enterprise’s business requirements and its stage of cloud journey is key to drive end-to-end transformation and minimise business disruptions for a smooth and secure transition to modernisation.

Find out more about how Kyndryl can help your company in app modernisation and cloud transformation journey here.

Digital Transformation

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Consolidation is happening across industries – even spirits. Acquiring companies gain a myriad of benefits when they add new brands to the fold, but one resulting downside is internal complexity and confusion caused by different systems and processes being used. The Pernod Ricard Group, the producer of premium spirits such as Chivas, Absolut, Martell, Ricard and Perrier-Jouet, experienced that very challenge.

A global company, Pernod Ricard operates 90 subsidiaries across 100 production sites in 80 different countries and employs over 19,000 workers. To track and monitor the entire lifecycle of its spirits, Pernod Ricard used server-based technology. Because of the volume of different products and the complexity in managing associated processes across so many countries and sites, however, it was becoming impractical and unsustainable, creating a disconnect for prospective IT technicians who are accustomed to working with more agile and accessible systems. In order to both compete for better talent and improve its operations, the company made a decision to forge ahead and build a single web- and mobile-based platform that would serve all main production plants, allowing teams to monitor operations from anywhere and on any device and enabling the company to implement automation and standardized data collection and management processes across all its brands.

Upon researching the market, Pernod Ricard concluded there were no solutions that could provide the adaptability and agility its operations would need for competitive advantages and continued future growth.

Buy, build… or modernize?

When the company struck out looking to buy, Pernod Ricard turned its focus internally toward a tool it had used previously that was still performing at a high level; however, it had become cumbersome and unsustainable for users. Pernod Ricard determined modernizing that internal application would deliver the flexibility, adaptability, and agility its users needed – and, at the same time, it would be a selling point for retaining and attracting new IT talent.

While web- and mobile-based applications were critical to the project, Rocket Software – which acquired Uniface, the company that had created the original application – started by revamping Pernod Ricard’s 2,500-page ERP, doing away with its outdated and unused pages. A hybrid team of Rocket Software and Pernod Ricard developers then worked hand-in-hand to rethink, reconstruct, and rewrite the entire framework of Pernod Ricard’s application. The team simplified and reduced the application’s components from 4,000 to 2,200 — cutting them nearly in half. To create a uniform platform for managing Pernod Ricard’s many brands, the team built the application out brand-by-brand, deploying new functionalities as they went. In doing so, Pernod Ricard hoped to introduce standardized data collection and management processes while still providing its brands with the freedom to implement into the software the different methods and functionalities specific to their operations.

Creating a better user experience

In less than three years, Pernod Ricard completed its modernization project, cutting the 1.3 million lines of code needed to create the software by 60%, substantially reducing coding times. Since its transition onto a single platform, the Pernod Ricard Group has signed an additional 180 users to its company, a true testament to the solution’s modernization and innovative allure to the next generation of talent.

By automating its barrel reservation and Cognac QA process, employees save two days of work per month on average, which allows teams more time for value-driven tasks. And newly integrated automation is helping to streamline Martell’s cask inventory operations. On the old platform, employees could complete the physical process of “debonding” and content measuring at a rate of 7,000 to 8,000 barrels daily. Since adding automation capabilities, employee workloads have been reduced and teams can now complete between 12,000 to 14,000 barrels per day, saving Pernod Ricard both time and money.

Faced with few options, Pernod Ricard chose to modernize and it’s paying big dividends for its digital transformation efforts. Next time you’re contemplating some combination of new hardware and/or software to address operational challenges in your business, the answer to those challenges may already be in-house.

Read more about Pernod Ricard’s modernization efforts here

Digital Transformation

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Educational institutions are continuing to accelerate their use of technologies such as e-learning, VR and AI-driven chatbots in order to facilitate remote and hybrid learning. Many expect the use of these digital technologies to become a permanent change, having recognised the flexibility and productivity benefits it can bring.

In a recent survey with leading institution across Germany, Ireland, Netherland and Sweden- close to half (46%) of campus IT and faculty say that greater use of social media for study support groups will become a permanent teaching method. While 19% believe a greater use of collaboration technologies for lectures will become an enduring teaching method. This survey also demonstrated that IT upgrades have affected the way people feel about technology, having learnt new skills and improved their work-life balance. 

The continued demand for distance learning means schools and universities are under increasing pressure to conduct lectures via digital platforms. However, at the same time institutions are having to meet complex security and compliance requirements and are often locked into the high capital expenditures that come with ageing data centres, long-term contracts and legacy applications.

What’s more, organisations in the public sector are often met with resistance from senior leaders when it comes to embracing new technologies, such as the cloud. This problem is often fuelled by a lack of awareness surrounding the ‘what’ and ‘how’ to adopt the cloud technology, along with fears over how much the migration journey could cost.

The Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE) framework enables schools, universities and research institutions to use cloud services more easily and helps them to recognise the full benefits of migrating from expensive legacy technologies.

It can save institutions from time-consuming and complex processes and gives them access to cloud services at a discounted rate, helping institutions that need funding assistance in order to migrate. By using the OCRE service agreements, the universities and the research community can access unique OCRE discounts to Amazon Web Services (AWS) that would otherwise not be available.

OCRE also takes the complexity out of compliance, offering ready-to-use contracts that have been designed to satisfy national and European public sector procurement regulations and GDPR requirements. Institutions can also be confident they’re meeting the education and research community’s specific requirements, including procurement and payment models that match the sector’s financial structures and funding prerequisites.

Rackspace has been exclusively chosen by GÉANT – the pan-European data network for the research and education community – to provide AWS services to institutions through the OCRE framework. This means that organisations concerned about the skills gap when it comes to IT expertise in the cloud can make use of free training on AWS. Rackspace, which has 15 AWS competencies, and 2700+ certifications, can also has considerable experience helping customers implement AWS solutions.

Ultimately, the OCRE framework empowers research institutions and universities to move their IT environments to the cloud, and to recognise the full benefits of doing so. Institutions can expect an increase in productivity, an improved work life balance, and can make it easier for students to work at their own pace.

If you want to learn more about Rackspace click here.

Education Industry