How to Unleash Your Organizational Impalas to Drive Your IT Transformation

By ibmblogsMay 25, 2021

Did you know that the African Impala can jump 10 feet high and leap as far as 33 feet? Yet the impala will stay in place if it is surrounded by a wall just five feet high. Compare the impala’s walls to the barriers organizations face when moving to the cloud while running legacy applications. Without a clear path, they can’t leap ahead, but they are still expected to move fast.

Today’s C-suite leaders understand the powerful changes that cloud technology can bring to the business. Digital transformation is about leveraging those technologies to deliver the next-gen products and services that will drive customer engagement and take the business to the next level.

To do this, many IT departments are moving away from the traditional capital investment model of IT—where an on-prem or off-prem data center was essential—to assembling a suite of applications and services born on the cloud.

These leaders have found that “building new” accelerates time to value – and they want to unlock the same value from their legacy environment which has the data and insights needed to maximize client engagement and improve employee experience. They need a way to streamline this “two-speed” IT world into a single operating model – quickly, simply, and cost-effectively.

With an integrated operating model in a hybrid environment, leaders can optimize services, operations and management across both legacy and cloud environments while accelerating time to business value. Without it, your digital transformation efforts may very well be stalled, and you may be adding unnecessary complexity to your organization and increased operational costs.

From legacy to cloud: A path to integration

Digital transformation uses technology to re-invent your business. The technology choices made today will drive revenue and underpin tomorrow’s digital transformation – and make or break business survival in a time of crisis, like the pandemic we are experiencing now.

At IBM, we have found that companies with a cohesive strategy for integrating legacy and born on the cloud are finding the greatest success in achieving digital transformation and gaining real-time insights. They know that an integrated IT operating model can increase the value to their business and reduce time to market.

These leading organizations understand the need for an IT strategy that supports new and emerging technologies, addresses regulatory requirements, and mitigates risks in the IT environment – while aligning with the business need to reduce costs, accelerating business capabilities and improving the customer experience.

Clearly, digital transformation is a critical path forward in today’s economy, and IT optimization paves the way. An integrated model across your hybrid landscape delivers IT optimization through a well-planned and defined architecture that ensures robust networking, resiliency, and security – all while giving you a single pane of glass with real-time insights into your environment.

Bridging gaps in technology, people and processes

What decisions does your business need to make to optimize the newest technologies on cloud, cost-efficiently?

First, it is important to understand that successful digital transformation of the enterprise requires more than just new technology. A successful shift to an integrated IT operating model also brings swift and comprehensive change to processes and people – specifically, how IT services are delivered and managed, and by whom.

How do you address the skills gap that arises when employees must learn the new world when they were trained on legacy? How do you change your processes to accommodate the new technology? What processes are reinvented as you move from traditional program structures to smaller, agile processes? These are all questions that must be addressed.

A partner like IBM can step in to supply and manage technology, people, skills and processes you need to maintain and manage the cloud environment, freeing your teams to focus on higher value tasks that contribute to better business outcomes.

The shift to hybrid multicloud

Many organizations use multiple public clouds from many vendors to deliver IT services. In fact, a hybrid multicloud environment is quickly becoming the new normal for many enterprises, but it can pose major challenges for teams accustomed to using on-premises infrastructure.

Managing cloud-based services across multiple providers can be overwhelming. Operational issues like dispersed workloads, security gaps and limited visibility on development teams’ output have IT leaders looking for ways to streamline management to simplify operations, satisfy business imperatives, and adapt to changing business landscape.

As you migrate and modernize your IT infrastructure, the business benefits of changing to a single operating model in a hybrid multicloud environment are numerous:

Increased time to value/market for new business capabilities
Reduced costs, increased efficiency
Real-time insights and visibility
A single pane of glass (control tower)
Improved customer and employee engagement due to improved user experience

The challenge for many organizations is with implementation. They know much of the ‘what’ but they need help with the ‘how.’ How do you effectively transition to a hybrid multicloud environment while keeping costs in check?

5 reasons hybrid multicloud management makes sense

Are your IT staff and resources maxed out trying to manage your hybrid, multicloud environment? If you are concerned about a lack of resources or skills, IBM cloud managed and multicloud management services can:

Manage risk: Identify and address risks to ensure security, compliance, and dependability.
Enhance innovation: Bring ideas to market more quickly in an integrated multicloud environment while maintaining governance, agility, and control of your hybrid multicloud landscape.
Increase visibility: A single interface providing access to open-standards tools, self-service access to ready-to-use patterns, and built-in governance.
Reduce total cost of ownership: Support and automate legacy IT while speeding the transition to cloud-based services infused with AI and advanced automation.
Maximize resource utilization on-premises while minimizing cloud costs.

Imagine how far the impalas in your organization could leap if barriers were removed and your data and processes were under one integrated IT operating model.

As you seek to maximize your investment dollars in a post-pandemic world, IBM will meet you where you are on your hybrid multicloud journey. With more than 4,600 customers, we have the experience and lessons learned to bring the best solutions to you on this journey while avoiding any further technical debt for a future-proofed end state. Unleash the impalas!

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