Siloing stifles data center growth

An IT industry analyst article published by SearchDataCenter.

It’s time to knock down those silos, one by one. IT is transforming from a siloed set of reactive cost centers into a service provider with a focus on helping the business compete.

In the old days of IT, admins built clear silos of domain expertise; IT infrastructure was complicated. Server admins monitored compute hosts, storage admins wrangled disks and network people untangled wires. Implementing parallel domains seemed like the best way to optimize IT. The theory was that you could run IT as efficiently as possible, allowing experts to learn specialized skills, deploy domain-specific hardware and manage complex resources.

Except that dealing with multiple IT domains was never optimal for anyone in the data center. When IT is organized into silos, anytime there is problem — troubleshooting application performance, competing for rack space, or allocating a limited budget — the resulting bickering, finger-pointing and political posturing wastes valuable time and money. And heterogeneous infrastructure is not very interoperable, despite standardized protocols and thorough vendor validation testing.

Navigating a byzantine organization just to try out new things can stifle business creativity and innovation, but things are beginning to change. There is a massive shift in IT organization and staffing…

…(read the complete as-published article there)