Make this your most modern IT year yet

An IT industry analyst article published by SearchDataCenter.

No one sticks with their New Year’s resolution — where is that gym card anyway? — but you can pick up seven modern habits and feel good about fit, healthy IT ops.

Industry analysts like to make outlandish predictions at the start of every new year. But since I focus already on predicting the next big thing, I’ve decided to adopt another New Year’s tradition: making resolutions. But I have a problem with that too. I only have a few bad habits and am intent on keeping them.

Instead, I’m going to suggest some resolutions for organizations to adopt modern IT:

1. Do something predictive with big data. Don’t even worry about the big data part if “big” doesn’t come naturally to the top of your pile of opportunities. You can always grow into bigger data efforts. But do look for a starter project to leverage the power of prediction. Commit to a project that embeds predictive algorithms or machine learning to get accustomed to what it is, what it can and can’t do, and how to approach it profitably. Some areas to consider might be to explore inherent clusters in your customer or client base, to estimate which client or transaction will succeed or fail, or to identify the most likely root causes of support issues.
2. Reduce opex through hyperconvergence. Converged infrastructure is clearly a natural evolution under the ever-present pressure to reduce total cost of ownership. Hyperconvergence, which offers a single building block of data center infrastructure that bakes in server, storage and networking resources all into one scale-out unit, takes this process to the extreme. While it might not solve every problem, there is no doubt that a large portion of do-it-yourself data center architecture could profitably migrate onto hyperconverged platforms. If you aren’t ready to completely convert, at least resolve to evaluate hyperconverged solutions for new projects. And if that is too big a leap, at least deploy some software-defined storage this year to get comfortable with this potential “new order” for modern IT.
3. Accelerate your infrastructure. Several acceleration technologies, like caching and in-memory processing, can easily drop into an IT environment with little effort, cost or risk. Although downstream users may complain about poor performance, they rarely ask if acceptable service could be accelerated 10x or 100x or more. Resolve to improve on the “satisfactory,” not just oiling the squeaky wheels, because acceleration technologies can spur noticeable improvements in quality of service. They can also lead to huge productivity gains for many, if not all, applications, to the point of creating competitive differentiation or even new sources of revenue.

…(for four more resolutions read the complete as-published article there)