Towards An Adaptable Infrastructure

Almost without exception, organizations in the Asia Pacific are on well progressed journeys to the cloud, but the routes they are taking to get there are different and so are their ultimate destinations.

This was one of the points of consensus at the recent Equinix roundtable held at the CDOTrends Chief Digital and Data Officer Summit in Singapore in May 2023 on the subject of adaptable infrastructure.

Technology leaders from a range of industry sectors joined Equinix experts and CDOTrends to discuss how to simplify the complexity of infrastructure, and how they can take a smarter approach to their technology strategies.

While they came from a wide range of industry sectors, some of the challenges were common. As digital leaders, they were all seeking to cut through an increasingly volatile environment and rapidly enable and deploy new business models. 

Standing in the way of this is rigid and complex infrastructure, rising costs and supply chain challenges, but there was good news—the participants agreed that there are smarter ways to drive efficiencies which also deliver improved global risk governance while also accelerating expansion at scale.

Need for portability

Key to all of this remains the cloud, and participants agreed that they needed to move between clouds, sometimes for compliance reasons and other times due to different needs in different jurisdictions. 

Others didn’t want to be “held ransom” by providers and were engaging different providers as part of their risk strategy.

Beyond that, there was a strong need to be able to deploy applications across different cloud environments, so portability was also an issue. Whereas two decades ago applications were created to run on particular operating systems, today the need was for choice and flexibility and that meant having portability between clouds.

Overwhelmingly, the consensus was that the cloud was not a binary choice, and that a hybrid mix depending on organizational needs was the optimal way forward.

There was some divergence in the discussion about whether to rent or buy infrastructure and solutions, but all of the participants were outsourcing at least some of their infrastructure and had intentions to do more.

As one technology leader from the property sector, told his peers, every time he saw a data center he saw a waste of space he would rather rent out or sell. There was no point, he said, in the company maintaining its own data centers when it could engage providers.

In highly regulated industries, such as financial services, there was an argument to keep some legacy infrastructure for core systems but at the same time these organisations were also “hollowing out” that core as they modernised their IT. While these technology leaders believe they would always have some core legacy in-house, that would gradually be eroded over time.

Infrastructure as a utility

Other participants had outsourced all of their infrastructure and data centers and were positive about the experience. 

In these organizations, the technology team now had the freedom to be able to focus on the business, andhelping the business in areas such as customerexperience. For them, infrastructure had become a utility, always on and always there like switching on the lights.

Overwhelmingly, the consensus was that the cloud was not a binary choice, and that a hybrid mix depending on organizational needs was the optimal way forward

Digital had moved beyond systems to keep the business functioning to a factor in building new business models, product and extending the organization’s competitive advantage. 

There were examples of how organizations were adding AI analytics layers on top of existing systems to deliver new products, but also—in the case of the construction industry—helping improve workplace health and safety outcomes, a key metric for that industry. 

Re-defining legacy

There was an ongoing discussion on legacy systems, with several participants making the point that the cycle for many solutions today was only around four years, whereas previously legacy had meant a system in use for up to 20 years.

For these technology leaders, solutions spent around two years in development and were then operational for another two years before they had outlived their value, and were up for replacement as a result of annual audits of IT assets and the technology stack.

Sustainability was also an issue growing in importance, as organizations factor in Scope 3 emissions from supply chain partners into their own journeys to net zero. 

IT played a role in this through engaging lower emission data centers, most often in an outsourced situation, and through the reduction in printing on paper. 

In the financial services sector, for example, which is heavy with compliance documentation, one participant outlined how his organization had created a self serviceportal for soft copy compliance documents, thereby delivering significant savings on paper printing. 

Importance of Governance

Organizations are still grappling with governance and how to align the technology and business functions, and participants in the Equinix event reported different levels of success.

Some enjoyed good relations with business colleagues, but in some other cases there remained a disconnect which hampered technology’s ability to help the business, or to demonstrate its value.

There were still cases where IT was considered a cost to be minimized, and not a capability to be leveraged for the benefit of the wider business. There was a risk that IT projects could be seen as having no business value, even if they reduced cost. 

These examples, however, were rare and all participants said their organizations were on journeys to improve their digital capabilities and this meant improved governance and fostering a collaborative culture as well as technology decisions.

The roundtable theme of adaptable infrastructure struck a chord among all the technology leaders, even as they described diverse challenges specific to their businesses.

Lachlan Colquhoun is the Australia and New Zealand correspondent for CDOTrends and the NextGenConnectivity editor. He remains fascinated with how businesses reinvent themselves through digital technology to solve existing issues and change their entire business models. You can reach him at [email protected].

Image credit: iStockphoto/SvetaZi