5 Tips to Successfully Plan for IT Modernization
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Measure and Monitor
As application and infrastructure modernization projects are being planned, it is crucial that the team agrees up front on the system parameters that will be used as telemetry and the metrics that establish the standards to be monitored and reported against. Continuous monitoring and reporting of these metrics allow the team to be able to establish a standard for system performance, availability and capacity so that any deviation can be quickly identified and rectified.
This type of proactive monitoring requires consistency in the service platform and allows the ability to consistently track, correlate and associate the metrics to ensure that the applications and infrastructure are running with the highest possible efficiencies. This also results in anomalies being quickly identified and corrected before they affect productivity.
This discipline requires executive-level commitment to make the needed investments up front to deliver standards for productivity, performance and availability and the proper tools to rapidly identify deviations, which may be indicative of a potential issue or outage. Legacy infrastructure may not have the needed telemetry or anomaly detection capabilities, so infrastructure planners should be looking for solutions that can map infrastructure to application performance. Most modern infrastructure solutions now utilize proactive log analytics, which can quickly determine any issues that may be early indicators of a failure, allowing the team to respond well before that failure condition actually occurs.
Today's IT leaders are not the same as yesterday’s. As more economic activity continues to take place digitally, IT departments are faced with more challenges every day. Not only are CIOs and IT decision makers being tasked to take on a multitude of ambitious strategies to transform the digital enterprise, but they are also expected to execute against their everyday demands – overseeing company computer operations; supervising information system and communications networks; and addressing policies, governance, compliance and security, just to name a few.
One strategy that will help drive real business growth and strategy across multiple departments, and free up the IT department to focus on the bigger picture, is IT modernization. And it's something that a lot of enterprises are considering – in fact, 70 percent of enterprises consider data center and application modernization a top priority for their business.
In this slideshow, Mark Lewis, CEO of Formation Data Systems, distills the top five things IT leaders should prioritize in order to make IT modernization a reality. The key to successful IT modernization includes proper planning, alignment with current and future goals and objectives, understanding vulnerabilities, and finding the right partner in order to facilitate implementation.
Related Topics : A Big Market for Big Data Jobs, Midmarket CIO, IT Management Automation, SharePoint, Technology Markets
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