Organisations seeking out new sources of revenue in a low-growth environment are experiencing a profound shift in the centre of economic gravity.
Some compete exclusively in the digital economy. Others keenly understand the need to digitally augment traditional goods and services. In both cases, digital services increasingly underpin engagement with employees, customers and partners.
Yet this accelerating shift poses a series of big questions about IT infrastructure, according to a new report from IDC. [1]
Is your private IT infrastructure up to the job?
A hybrid approach to IT infrastructure has become ubiquitous, pursued by nine out of 10 organisations, according to IDC.[2]
Increasingly, the quality of this infrastructure defines a company’s ability to make data-driven decisions, meet customer demands and scale operations. In addition, the rise of AI means that infrastructure is becoming more than a back-office utility. Increasingly, it is an enabler of innovation, allowing organisations to engage with customers and generate revenues in new and cost-efficient ways.
However, realising the full potential of hybrid infrastructure depends on a key precondition. Private IT must be able to deliver its capabilities on a par with public cloud, operating in a way that’s automated, secure, agile and scalable.
Technical debt and legacy systems
In a surprising number of enterprises, according to IDC, this simply isn’t the case. Funding shortfalls and competing priorities mean that the challenges surrounding private IT infrastructure are often substantial:
- Many companies run servers past the end of their supported lifespan: IDC’s research shows that, on average, only 40% of the server estate is less than three years old.[3] With energy costs rising up the agenda, enterprises in this position are missing out on major recent improvements in server core density and power efficiency. More generally, legacy IT infrastructure hinders agility, generates elevated operational costs and makes it challenging to integrate technologies.
- Inefficiency is an issue. According to IDC, four out of 10 organisations report average server utilisation rates of 25%.[4] Inefficiency on this scale suggests that a major opportunity exists to drive up efficiency by investing in modern, consolidated systems built for automated workload management.
- Automation, orchestration and AIOps are essential to key data centre priorities including security, resilience, efficiency and agility. However, in legacy-heavy environments, the possibilities for successful deployment are typically limited.
- Scaling AI solutions requires extensive adoption of advanced IT infrastructure: automation, dynamic workload management, DevOps and containerization, integrated data management and digital trust. As inferencing and training workloads spread outwards from the data centre to run alongside business applications, on edge servers and end-user devices, the need for scale-up and scale-out solutions is becoming painfully evident in many organisations.
Conclusion
Private IT infrastructure is here to stay. To play its role successfully, however, in-house infrastructure must aim to match the performance of public cloud.
The broad AMD infrastructure portfolio enables IT leaders to modernise traditional enterprise applications while also supporting those who need high-performance computing to support AI ambitions.
In many organisations, the need to refresh and modernise hardware assets is already substantial. In the face of a continuing requirement to unlock new sources of revenue growth, it can only become increasingly urgent.
Read the full report: Guidance for Future-Ready IT Infrastructure, produced by IDC in association with AMD.
[1] IDC, Guidance for Future-Ready IT Infrastructure, sponsored by AMD
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid