INVESTING FOR THE FUTURE: In many cases, the trend toward longer hardware lifecycles has reached a tipping point where the pros no longer outweigh the cons. Longer refresh cycles make it difficult to introduce new applications and achieve sustainability goals. Aging hardware incurs more technical debt, hampers agility and makes it difficult to scale, especially when qualified IT staffers are at a premium. Organizations undergoing change related to mergers or experiencing industry disruption often believe that they lack the capacity to overhaul their infrastructure. However, accelerating infrastructure modernization provides the increased agility and frictionless services delivery that businesses need to stay resilient amid change. Most important, lowering technical debt enables skilled employees to focus on returning value to the organization.

RIGHT-SIZING CLOUD USAGE: Many organizations moved massive workloads to the cloud without an overarching hybrid strategy designed to capture the best of both worlds. For workloads that burst up intermittently, the public cloud remains the best way to ensure flexibility and on-demand scalability. However, strategically repatriating workloads on-premises can be a fruitful modernization opportunity, assuming that the data center can support frictionless, self-service and scalable workloads. For example, Infrastructure as a Service brings the subscription model of the cloud to hardware, reducing the high capital expenditure of new data center components and operationalizing it across the length of the contract. Notably, this provides additional resources when they are needed while eliminating the risk of overpaying for capital expenditures if growth is slower than anticipated.

ON-PREMISES ADVANTAGES: For steady, predictable workloads, a well-architected, on-premises data center is often the most cost-effective and efficient solution. Despite the benefits of the cloud, several factors can make on-premises computing attractive. For operations that are subject to regulation, organizations may find it more feasible to implement required security and stay on top of security configurations in an on-premises environment. Healthcare providers that need frequent access to patient data, such as imaging results, will gain faster performance in a low-latency, on-premises environment. Legacy organizations also may be heavily invested in certain types of hardware, such as mainframes, that have gained some measure of advantage because they are unattractive targets for hackers.

MOVING TOWARD CONTAINERS: Organizations moving away from legacy environments usually begin with heavily virtualized environments before moving toward more modern architectures, such as containers. Newer organizations that leveraged the cloud from the outset are likely also using containers, although perhaps as a byproduct rather than as an intentional choice. On the continuum between virtualization and containers, the latter makes it possible to divide up workloads more finely than virtualization platforms allow. That means that organizations can be more surgical with workloads while also having portability to the public cloud. In a hybrid infrastructure, the proximity of cloud and on-premises solutions can facilitate the move to containers more easily. At the same time, reskilling staff can be a lengthy process and, for some organizations, an impediment to adoption.

As the market continues to evolve, organizations may need guidance to determine the most appropriate solutions and subscription models for their environments. Considerations include how and when to transition from one vendor to another, perpetual licenses versus software subscriptions, and whether to move away from virtualization toward Kubernetes and containerized applications. CDW can help organizations assess the changing landscape to determine the best path forward.

Licensing Assessment: This service is designed to help customers understand what they own, where it is deployed, and the pros and cons of various licensing agreements.

Infrastructure and Platform Assessment: This service assesses workloads through the lens of infrastructure and platforms, with the goal of helping organizations identify the best ways to effectively and efficiently deploy workloads.

Advisory Workshops: These workshops are designed to help organizations migrate data center or virtualized workloads to the cloud, leveraging their current licensing or infrastructure as a jumping-off point.

“Seven-Layer” Assessment: This tailored service provides a complete assessment of customers’ environments to help them make the best decisions for their data centers and overall IT environments.