Modern IT Operations: Top 5 Factors To Consider
If you are among the company leaders that are in charge of your organization’s IT operations, it’s likely that you are aware of the new IT trends and planning to, or currently implement new technologies to solve your company’s business challenges.
For example, many physical retail stores are transforming into digital ones, enable consumers to place their orders online, via a mobile app or an E-commerce website, instead of having to visit the store physically - and get their items delivered within 24hrs. The benefits are tremendous and can help retail businesses to improve sales and capture a wider audience.
Some have only gone so far and stayed there. Yet, many companies continuously improve their IT operations by implementing an advanced analytics platform, to gain meaningful insights from the huge volume of customers data generated by their businesses every day.
Most companies put down a lot of investment (in terms of both time and money) into modern technologies. In this article, let’s take a look closer look at the modern IT operation and considerations that IT leaders can take into account - to realize the maximum value of their IT investments.
The Modern IT Operation
While there is no silver bullet, one-size fit all IT solution, these are among highly suggested initiatives that IT leaders can adopt to build their modern IT operations:
- Leverage technologies that enhance your organization's speed and flexibility
In recent years, businesses have been adopting automation to simplify how rules-based, repetitive tasks are performed, and automation has been gaining a lot of attention lately. This is an effective way to help businesses streamline operations and saving time as well as reducing operating costs and improve productivity.
Many tasks such as data entry, when performing manually, can become lengthy and prone to error. When a business organization needs scaling up, automation can be an effective solution.
Automation is essential to IT processes modernization and can be implemented from the cloud to multi-cloud, and even on-premises. Automation helps businesses to realign and focus more on higher-value activities.
Notable trends such as DevOps, Intelligent Automation, and continuous integration/continuous deployment - which can help reduce dependencies between systems and processes. Here, a failure of one component/module does not significantly affect or causing the failure of the entire system, this enables organizations to become more agile and flexible.
Even though many IT operations activities can be strategically automated, it's important to distinguish which activities are suitable for automation and whether the benefits can outweigh the downsides. To get started, companies can identify the problems that should be solved via automation and how they can measure the benefits and outcomes expected.
- Moving into the Cloud
Today, many businesses are still operating under legacy applications, with restricted capacity, and difficult to scale up or down. This leads to slower development and innovation processes, with intensive in-house IT resources required for maintenance and subsequently more hardware needed.
The business world is shifting to cloud technology, and organizations moving their systems to the cloud will be able to speed up the operations, gaining the flexibility to compete in the market. Thus, for modern IT operations, moving to the cloud is critical to compete and significantly enhance business viability.
When it comes to cloud strategy, there are quite a number of options, ranging from public cloud to multi-cloud (more than one public cloud), private cloud, and hybrid cloud. Still, security, regulation compliance, and costs remain important concerns for businesses when adopting cloud solutions. the right cloud strategy depends on the nature of your business as well as other business factors governing your business operations.
Thus, more than just a place to store data for access anytime, anywhere, cloud computing is necessary to the modern IT operation, and cloud technology is also critical to accelerating the adoption of other emerging technologies like analytics and AI.
- The importance of Data
Data does not provide much value if it's not of quality. Thus, ensuring data quality is of utmost importance to ensure the desired effect of modern technologies like AI and Analytics.
Moreover, with the increased number of cyberattacks happening to enterprises in recent years, it is also necessary for organizations to apply cybersecurity measures that anticipate threats and build frameworks to manage data safely. All in all, it provides an efficient cycle of data creation and consumption, where quality is taken care of.
- Manage your company’s IT investments well across the business.
Data or technologies, if stayed silos in separate departments, may deter collaboration and interoperability. Clear visibility into data, applications, infrastructure across your organization helps ensure that IT innovation is applied across businesses for maximum return on investment.
- Nurture your talent in creative ways.
Innovative technologies require specialists to operate on, as well as performing maintenance and upgrade. But, the problem of IT shortage is more prominent than ever, so organizations and IT leaders need to look further in the future and have a plan in place to hire and nurture IT talents.
Fostering a culture of talent nurturing in your workforce through up-skilling and cross-skilling can also help fill up the vacant and get the workers with the right skills for the roles.
Conclusion
Adopting modern technologies is the direction to take, but systematic change is not easy. Many business organizations and enterprises are undertaking their technology and modernization projects, moving away from legacy systems into cloud-based environments, narrowing the technology gaps, and compete better in the new digital age.
