5 Tips to Successfully Plan for IT Modernization

Understand and Address Vulnerabilities

If a CIO or IT leader decides that they need to introduce new applications, technologies or processes into the organization, it's important for them to understand any potential vulnerabilities that may be introduced with the changes before they are implemented. This typically requires an audit of not only security processes and data governance, but also a careful look at the data lifecycle to ensure that the data is always available and recoverable under any failure scenario. Modern data centers are being built in the model that has been popularized by the hyper-scale service providers. These platforms are now becoming more common in the enterprise to improve system availability and to dramatically lower costs.

This model deploys advanced software that runs on commodity compute infrastructure in a distributed fashion. Because the software is completely independent of the hardware, it delivers higher overall resilience, fault tolerance and system availability than even the most expensive enterprise class infrastructure. Data protection and recovery is also a critical vulnerability that requires modern approaches. No longer is a backup window appropriate, but rather organizations must be able to recover data quickly and with recovery point objectives (RPOs) approaching zero to ensure that if data recovery is needed, the amount of data lost is minimized to protect the business.