Reinventing Your Business as a 21st Century Enterprise with the Key Tenets of Enterprise IT

The global economy has been in a reboot mode – and with good reason. Technological innovation won’t stop disrupting markets anytime soon. The need to innovate and modernize enterprise IT isn’t merely an option. If you’re doing things the way you did them five years ago, you’re closer to being disrupted than you know. To paraphrase Marshall Goldsmith’s iconic words, companies that were leaders in the 20th century can see that “what got them here won’t get them there”.

Historically most organizations that have flourished in longer-term actually reinvented themselves and the list includes the giants like IBM, Boeing, Citi, Microsoft, and many more. At the same time, we have giants mushrooming up overnight and a fifth-grader can cite examples of these Google, Facebook, Uber, Ola, Flipkart, Air BnB and the list continues to grow while we read this piece. What’s interesting today is the time taken to gestate a thought from ideation to execution to scale has drastically gone down. We have seen market leaders diminishing and losing market share swiftly in lieu of failing to digitally transform themselves; Blackberry, Nokia can be the top two examples.

“Corporations have to become masters of creative destruction – built for discontinuity, remade like the market. They must increase the pace of change to levels comparable with the market.” In Creative Destruction, Richard N. Foster and Sarah Kaplan.

So, what is this change, how is the market evolving today?

Enterprise IT is no longer looked at as a cost-center anymore, in fact, many successful organizations have made it their critical enabler, a strength that they attribute their successes to. Like in all phases of life, Enterprise IT is also seeing innovation at a rapid pace across all industry verticals. Every quarter spent without modernizing your enterprise IT is a quarter closer to being in battle with a leaner and smarter competitor who’s continually improving its IT capabilities.

Today is a time and age, where Enterprise IT is under tremendous pressure to adapt and endorse the latest technologies, rev-up their application development life cycles, and come out as the torch bearers of technology adoption. It’s a gold rush mentality that sometimes innovation is being approached, but this is also leading too many of them are latching on to unsustainable technologies and that’s becoming the problem for businesses.

So, it is the need of the hour for key IT decision-makers to take stalk and take the right decisions that do not compromise the agility of an organization in the long run. This can be done as soon as we identify the four key tenets of a modern-day enterprise IT.

• Multi-cloud Approach

Multi-cloud is an approach for progressive organizations that want to surge through with the benefits of the cloud without placing all their eggs in the same basket. A multi-cloud architecture empowers an enterprise to have a distributed workloads set-up across multiple cloud environments, enabling themselves with the benefits of each and mitigating risks associated with individual cloud environments.

Multi-cloud is also very advantageous to developers the utmost flexibility to be able to work in an autonomous manner. Single cloud architecture has technological limitations of all kinds. Multi-cloud, on the other hand, ensures that there are other cloud services available should any application development warrant the need for anything specific that’s not provided by the current vendors.

• DevOps

DevOps plays an essential role in digital transformation – from identifying patterns to uncovering new revenue streams. DevOps helps organizations succeed with digital transformation by shifting the cultural mindset of the business, breaking down detrimental silos, and paving the way for continuous change and rapid experimentation. Digital transformation is almost impossible without well-placed collaboration between different teams building and running IT systems. The speed of technology change is so quick that no one team can expect to understand all the details of relevant technologies, so we need to enable teams to focus on a smaller problem domain & DevOps enables just that.

• Cyber Security

All across the commercial, industrial, healthcare, education and government sectors, and cybersecurity has become a chief concern among managers and directors. Due to cybersecurity vulnerabilities, many businesses have been targeted by hackers or been subject to data breaches. Cybersecurity threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated and dangerous as we progress in technology. It is becoming more expansive across a wider attack surface that is no longer contained within well-defined and protected perimeters. For eg. As workloads move off-premises, there is a danger that IT will lose visibility. With so much at stake in terms of your company’s security, finances, and reputation, it is crucial to have an enterprise cybersecurity program in place to safeguard vital data.

• Data Analytics Powered by AI

Today, artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics make a good team. But in just a few years, AI-powered analytics will help you create and deliver on all your most important strategies. Data is of prime importance today than ever before and what you make of data more important than data itself. With AI-powered analytics, you and your team can concentrate on the initiatives that really matter instead of burying yourself in reports. The payback of Data Analytics powered by AI comes in several forms and is capable of generating significant business value. Some organizations are also racing to a competitive advantage. Usage of AI/ML in data analytics will continue to increase over the next few years, eventually becoming invisible because it becomes embedded into the business process. So, it’s time for your business to take your first step towards data analytics powered by AI to be able to leverage the most for your business.