By Tom Hearn / 27 Jun 2024 / Topics: Digital transformation IT modernization IT optimization Modern infrastructure
As infrastructures evolve and change, technical debt builds. As debt builds, maintenance costs often go up, processes slow down and performance suffers — problems that all create roadblocks to modernization and innovation. What’s more, aging systems and architectures are more difficult to secure against threat actors.
Enterprises can’t completely avoid tech debt. But it is possible to minimize the impact — through careful planning and management. Organizations should take a holistic approach that includes understanding where the tech debt can live, having a plan for prioritizing it, and getting more strategic about how decisions are made. This stops harmful technical debt from mounting and blocking the business from important change.
To address technical debt, here are three guiding points from my colleague John O’Shaughnessy, Insight Infrastructure Architect and Senior Consultant. In his blog, he says:
Upcoming renewals, M&As and divestiture activity are compelling events that often push the business to modernize. Don’t rush your decision-making — make sure you’re identifying and adopting cost and resource-effective solutions to avoid more technical debt down the line.
Making headway on modernization means organizations need a balance between maintaining infrastructure while also pursuing forward-thinking projects. But with complex systems that require 24/7 monitoring and support, the time and resources left for modernization can be hard to come by.
Plus, ongoing operational duties can take up a hefty portion of an IT team's time and attention — creating roadblocks to innovation with limited resources available for strategic initiatives.
To address this hurdle, the shift to consumption-based models is one approach that we see making a big difference in resource allocation. In fact, our 2024 survey on digital transformation revealed that an overwhelming 96% of organizations are actively using one or more as-a-service delivery models to support the business, and more than 80% are using three or more.
Outdated IT infrastructure models can limit transformation efforts because they lead to vendor lock-in, rigid costs and limited scalability. With XaaS solutions across the infrastructure stack, organizations can pay for what they use and quickly adjust their scale. This frees up agility and resources, allowing the organization to focus on modernizing.
Building a powerhouse
Cornerstone Bulding Brands — the largest building products manufacturer in the U.S. — leans on Insight to help run their infrastructure service offerings as part of a much broader transformation plan. Hear its leadership talk about the company's strategic objectives in this video.
AI is helping organizations drive modernization and innovation at incredible speeds. But getting more ROI from AI requires AI-ready infrastructure across networking, storage and compute. Many of our clients tell us that finding the right infrastructure and platforms to support AI solutions is a challenge for many organizations, and implementing it is another challenge entirely.
Here's real advice we give clients when it comes to building AI-ready infrastructure, whether they’re doing it from scratch or with existing IT infrastructure:
Your organization may be at a crossroads today as you reconsider your strategy for modernizing infrastructure. Today, the benefits of modernization initiatives can’t be overlooked — from cost optimizing to improving performance, strengthening security, addressing technical debt and unlocking bandwidth for innovation.
Empower innovation with modern infrastructure
Explore top considerations, common roadblocks, benefits and use cases for modernizing and adopting AI infrastructure technologies.
Tom Hearn, Vice President Field Architecture, Insight
Over the course of Tom’s 15+ year career, he has established himself as a strategic technical leader with deep knowledge of infrastructure, development, automation, DevOps and security. He is extremely passionate about helping clients solve their tech challenges, which has helped him thrive in his role at Insight.
