IT Infrastructure perspectives from Computacenter

Briefing 57

Pushing the limits

Technology has changed the shape of our world in so many ways – and that includes the nature of the business enterprise. Companies no longer stop at the walls of their offices. They have a virtual existence too. Some may do all or most of their business on the web. And, increasingly, organisations take advantage of technology to extend and strengthen their workforce, capabilities and partnerships far beyond their physical premises.

There are plenty of reasons for doing this. Organisations may be looking for increased business agility, the ability to recruit the best people, wherever they are and however they prefer to work, or extended business hours and territories. But there are challenges too. It's not just a case of installing the right systems: if your business and your staff are truly to benefit, your IT and communications infrastructure, your methods of working and even your corporate culture may be in need of a refresh.

The features in this issue explore how you can reap the benefits of becoming a borderless organisation. If you get it right, you really can push back the limits of your business.

Briefing 56

Managing your software needs

The path to efficient and cost-effective IT starts with understanding what you have now. Only with a clear picture of your estate can you hope to plan and implement systems in a tactically effective and strategically coherent way.

Nowhere is that more apparent than with software. Managing licences across your entire IT infrastructure is challenging, as we see in our main strategy feature (pg.10). But there are unarguable reasons why it must be done effectively.

For one thing, you can save considerable amounts of money through bulk deals and avoiding unnecessary, ‘just in case’ licensing of software you’re not actually using. Then there’s the need to ensure you are compliant. Finding out the hard way that you’re not means more than just fines – it could entail serious damage to your business reputation.

The root of the problem is the complexity of your infrastructure. One part of solving the software problem may be to reduce that complexity. And where you can’t, it helps to have an outsider’s perspective on what your software assets are and how best to manage them.

Briefing 55

Centres of excellence

Some things in life are just more effective in concentrated form. IT services can certainly fall into that category, whether it’s providing a help desk, datacentre management or any one of a number of key organisation-wide services.

Running such services from a centralised location has obvious cost benefits, derived not least from lack of duplication. However, these may pale into insignificance against the advantages of greater control, standardisation of systems and the ability to better monitor and manage processes and service level agreements, as we see in our Strategy feature.

What may surprise some is how easily at least part of this centralisation can be moved offshore. But, as Nick Jinks of Digica shows, that’s a secondary consideration to ensuring you tackle other issues correctly – such as ensuring your workforce and executives are fully behind the idea.

In the Solutions feature, we show how centralisation is made easier if you can call on the experience of a partner who has been down this road many times and has developed processes to ensure that it all works as planned.

Briefing 54

The benefits of tactical outsourcing

When your organisation's most important processes are dependent on IT, it seems like the datacentre is the beating heart of the business. Outsourcing it, then, can seem like a dangerous idea. The benefits, however, are impossible to ignore.

Outsourcing your datacentre operations can set your organisation free, allowing it to become more agile and effective. However, to support the business and compete effectively in a fast-changing market, organisations need to ensure their datacentre operations and management are as efficient, secure, cost-effective, resilient, scalable and highly available as possible.

Creating and managing such an optimum facility in-house is not always practical. It requires you to have access to the latest technologies and skills, as well as the ability to adhere to best-practice principles governing service delivery, process management and security.

In contrast, working with a specialist IT services company not only gives you access to experience and resources developed with a wide range of customers, it also provides a fast route to industry best practices that might be difficult, expensive or time-consuming to acquire yourself.

In this issue, we look at the best ways of approaching datacentre outsourcing and the genuine business benefits you can achieve. We also discuss how outsourcing need not - indeed, should not - be an all-or-nothing proposition.

Briefing 53

Getting the best value from your investment

Achieving the greatest return on investment in IT is naturally a high priority for all organisations. This can be difficult, however, if a great deal of your time and effort is spent simply maintaining and supporting the IT estate. You may also face the problem of a datacentre that simply can't expand to accommodate growth.

And perhaps your IT is not as flexible as it should be when it comes to supporting new business initiatives.
Many serious problems faced by businesses and their IT departments stem from the complexity of their systems. Optimising IT not only opens the path to serious cost savings, through more effective and efficient use of hardware and staff resources, it can also provide your organisation with much greater adaptability.

However, this is not purely a technical issue. The changes needed to achieve the maximum levels of cost reduction and enhanced agility may require significant changes to the way you deliver IT capabilities. It requires moving away from rigid or fixed cost structures towards providing IT as a service, paid for by each part of the business according to what it actually uses. If you can make that change, you have the potential to deliver a higher level of benefits to the business without needing a major new investment.

Briefing 52
These days, most IT departments are well aware that the true cost of hardware has to be measured over the full span of its life. The days are gone when purchase price was the only criterion for buying equipment and the only way its cost was measured was on the balance sheet.

However, this acknowledgement of the true costs may obscure the benefits– not just lower costs – that you can reap from smarter purchasing processes. Indeed, the extreme ends of the equipment lifecycle – acquisition and disposal – need careful attention if they are not to prove unnecessarily expensive and an administrative burden. Better purchasing procedures can make your business more responsive and put strategically important tools into the hands of users much faster. And using third-party specialists for disposal can, in the right circumstances, turn a cost into an income – as well as allowing you to do your bit to help the planet.

In our Strategy and Solutions feature, we provide a blueprint for how you can turn the burdens of purchasing and disposal into benefits for your business.

Guarding against the threats to your organisation
Security is an issue that has always been with us. Its increasingly high profile, however, is a reflection of the importance that IT has in our lives and in the running of our businesses. As the pervasiveness of technology continues to grow, so do the opportunities for malicious activity.

IT systems and networks are also far more complex today than they were even just a few years ago. In our main strategy feature we look at the nature of the threats and how to adopt the right attitude to them, which includes recognising that this is a never-ending task that is not amenable to a one-size-fits-all approach.

Fortunately, the IT industry has developed strategies and technologies to combat the threats we face, and our solutions feature shows how they are best deployed. First, however, you need to make an honest appraisal of where your weaknesses may lie and how best to address them. This is something the Nationwide Building Society has done very effectively, and in our opinion piece its divisional director of technology shares some valuable insights.

Building an infrastructure for the future
This is the 50th issue of Briefing, and the magazine has certainly changed significantly since the first issue. In many ways, those changes reflect the changes in the ICT landscape and the nature of the market. The key issues today revolve around the ways in which ICT delivers value to the business. Quite rightly, those people whose job it is to deliver those benefits are concerned less with the details of platforms and technology per se, and more with services and achieving the high levels of service delivery that businesses demand.

That demand is there because ICT now underpins so many aspects of the business – in many cases, it is the business. Any interruption to computer and communications systems – even for relatively short periods – can mean loss of business and loss of reputation, perhaps to a fatal degree.

So, in this issue we concentrate on Business Continuity Planning as it applies to ICT systems and examine the ways in which, if disaster strikes, you stand the best possible chance of carrying on unimpeded.