by Peter Eicher
In technology, we’re always trying to predict the future, and the future is always now. One of the best ways to guess the future of IT is to ask those for whom it matters most: people in IT departments. VMware did just that and released a very informative study called “The State of IT Transformation.” As they described the “current state and… biggest gaps” in organizations, it struck me that for all of these operational gaps Catalogic provided a great solution. The IT transformation report breaks things down into four key areas where IT needs to improve: hybrid cloud, user self-service, automation and application development. These align perfectly with the use cases we’ve described for Catalogic ECX in-place copy data management software. Let’s look at each in turn.
Hybrid Cloud
Everyone wants to get there, most haven’t yet. According to the report, “Most companies are not where they want to be in having a well-engineered hybrid cloud architecture. Over ninety percent reported they are currently only in the evaluation or proof of concept stage.”
One of the biggest inhibitors of hybrid cloud adoption is the corporate data problem: how do I get my system-of-record data, currently trapped in my data center, into the cloud so I can leverage the power of limitless cloud compute resources?
At Catalogic, we have a great methodology for getting system-of-record data into the cloud. Rather than belabor it here, I’ll point you to a white paper we’ve created that explains just how we did it with a combination of NetApp storage and IBM SoftLayer cloud compute.
User Self-Service
The report is very clear here: “IT organizations are experiencing a cultural revolution. They want to run IT like a customer-focused business. They want to empower users with self-service.”
Self-service is one of those things that simultaneously makes the IT person’s heart go squishy with happiness – “No more pesky users pestering me!” – and icy cold with fear – “What untold havoc will users wreak if I let them touch my stuff?”
Unfortunately, the report warns that “with respect to IT skills, eighty-eight percent of companies have not begun, or are only in the preliminary stages of developing skills in both business-facing service definition and cloud technology.” There’s a massive skills gap out there, and no wonder. Technology vendors in general build tools for IT, not tools designed for IT to share with end users. Yet this is precisely what Catalogic has built: a tool that lets users request their own resources – either data storage via snapshots, or full systems via spinning up VMs – while allowing IT to remain firmly in control of who gets what, how much, for how long, and so on. And it’s all governed by roles-based access controls (RBAC) so nobody messes with your stuff.
Automation
As the report notes, “When it comes to automation, the most basic service, and the foundation for many other more complex or business-focused services, is infrastructure provisioning.” But in the present world, infrastructure provisioning is anything BUT automated: it’s clunky, funky and smells like a monkey, with over half of the survey respondents saying it takes between a week and month to provision resources. This jibes precisely with what Catalogic folks in the field hear from customers, and what analyst organizations say. And this waiting around gets end users miffed, especially if you are doing things like DevOps development. Nobody wants to wait a week for resources. Heck, they don’t even want to wait an hour. (More on development in the next section.)
Fortunately, Catalogic has seen the future and our ECX product is precisely an infrastructure provisioning automation machine (henceforth known by everyone as an IPAM – you heard it here first!). We can schedule the provisioning of infrastructure resources to happen when needed and where needed. For example, if a business analytics team needs fresh copies of data, ECX can mount the latest snapshot (local or remote copy) up to an analytics server and refresh it every day (or more frequently if you want) so the numbers crunchers are always crunching fresh numbers (and everyone knows fresh numbers have more crunch).
Application Development
Application development is really a use case built on top of the other three items we’ve been discussing. If you bring together hybrid cloud, user self-service and automation – which is what Catalogic does – then you can build out a very robust application development environment, whether you are using classic waterfall techniques or the latest DevOps methodology, or something in between. As the report says, “One of the most significant gaps in application transformation is in participants’ application infrastructure.”
It always comes back to infrastructure. You got to have it, and ideally it will be automated and/or offerable via self-service. We did precisely this recently at a customer and the results were beyond even our best expectations. For their application development organization, their infrastructure management time dropped from about 60 hours a month to three hours a month – a 95% decrease in time spent, or correspondingly a 95% improvement in productivity. THAT’s the efficiency you gain from automation and self-service. No wonder they call it the future.
The remainder of the report breaks things down by industry so you can see how you stand relative to your peers. If you’re like most organizations surveyed, you can’t wait for the future to arrive but you don’t know how to get there. At Catalogic, we’re all about bringing to future to you today, with push-button ease. And it’s easy, too. Want to try it yourself? Contact CompuTec Integrated Solutions, our partner, for a demo or to download a trial of the software.
Don’t let the future stay in the future. Grab hold of it now, with Catalogic.
About CompuTec Integrated Solutions & Catalogic Software
CompuTec Integrated Solutions is an IBM business partner since 1995, offering a breath of services and a certified team of specialists who can help devise a strategic plan around an organization’s particular needs. More than just a service provider; they offer consultative resource that can help steer a business throughout the IT lifecycle – from implementation, setup, configuration, to the support thereafter. Catalogic Software is the leading provider of software-defined copy data solutions, and is the only vendor whose products are purpose built to leverage the copy services within a customers’ existing storage and hypervisor infrastructure. Catalogic is a proud partner with CompuTec Integrated Solutions.