Page 44 - FCW, May/June 2018
P. 44

                                   IT TRANSFORMATION
Modernizing
 beyond the data center
By decoupling apps from physical infrastructure, agencies can provide continuity across complex environments
Matthew Schneider
Senior Director of Government, Education and Health Care, VMware
professionals’ time, week in and week out. Automating those tasks allows agencies to focus their limited resources and team members on critical activities that deliver the most value to the enterprise.
Bringing security
to the application
In addition to the IT team, agencies must consider other agency users. Bring- your-own-device environments have introduced the need to offer a consistent experience across all devices. By focusing on delivering the right applications to employees based on their security level and location, agencies can provide a
WHEN IT COMES to data center modernization, agencies recognize that it’s not just the data center they’re modernizing. They also have a chance to revamp the way they deliver services inside and outside the data center.
Agencies should go beyond simply replacing legacy infrastructure with
2.0 editions and take advantage of the opportunity to transform their operations, services and approach to IT infrastructure.
That involves developing an environment agile enough to ensure the consistency
of operations regardless of where those infrastructure pieces sit. In addition, applications must be serviced, secured and supported with ubiquity whether they’re hosted in a private data center, a public cloud or a hybrid environment.
Agencies should start by gaining a better understanding of their applications — how they behave, how much they cost, how they are secured today, who needs to access them and what other resources they depend on. To build a modern IT environment, agencies must decouple applications’ dependency on the physical infrastructure. When an application is independent of the infrastructure, agencies have the ability
to seamlessly support that application
if it needs to move from a physical data center to another or even into a cloud. And it can be done while retaining the same security policies, visibility and application continuity.
The value of automation
To have that commonality of approach across multiple environments, agencies
must ask themselves if they are building a structure that will allow them to manage applications solely in a traditional data center or across the many clouds that their environment will be composed of going forward.
Beyond the infrastructure, agencies should leverage automation tools that allow them to take advantage of the existing physical infrastructure and new virtual infrastructures without being dependent on hardware platforms that might not extend into their cloud environments.
Automation can also help agencies eliminate some of the repetitive tasks that consume as much as 40 percent of IT
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