Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
Article | July 13, 2023
COVID-19 has altered our world. In this series of stories, Data Center Frontier explores the strategic challenges the pandemic presents for the data center and cloud computing sectors as we navigate this complex new landscape. We begin with a look at how COVID-19 is impacting demand for digital infrastructure. The COVID-19 Coronavirus pandemic has reinforced the importance of data centers and cloud computing for our society. In the early days of the crisis, the data center
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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, Windows Systems and Network
Article | July 11, 2023
The pandemic has had a seismic impact on the telecom sector. This is perhaps most notably because where and how the world goes to work has been re-defined, with nearly every business deepening its commitment to mobility. Our homes suddenly became our offices, and workforces went from being centrally managed to widely distributed. This has called for a heightened need for widespread, secure and high-speed connectivity around the clock.
5G has answered the call, and 5G location intelligence and big data can provide service providers with the information they need to optimize their investments.
Case in point: Juniper Research reported in its 5G Monetization study that global revenue from 5G services will reach $73 billion by the end of 2021, rising from just $20 billion last year.
5G flexes as connected devices surge
Market insights firm IoT Analytics estimates there will be more than 30 billion IoT connections by 2025. That's an average of nearly four IoT devices per person. To help meet the pressure this growth in connectivity is putting on telecom providers, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is taking action to make additional spectrum available for 5G services and promoting the digital opportunities it provides to Americans. The FCC is urging that investments in 5G infrastructure be prioritized given the "widespread mobility opportunity" it presents, as stated by FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel.
While that's a good thing, we must also acknowledge that launching a 5G network presents high financial risk, among other challenges. The competitive pressures are significant, and network performance matters greatly when it comes to new business acquisition and retention. It's imperative to make wise decisions on network build-out to ensure investments yield the anticipated returns.
Thus, telcos need not – and should not – go it blindly when considering where to invest. You don't know what you don't know, which is why 5G location intelligence and big data can provide an incredible amount of clarity (and peace of mind) when it comes to optimizing investments, increasing marketing effectiveness and improving customer satisfaction.
Removing the blindfold
Location data and analytics provide telcos and Communications Service Providers (CSPs) with highly-specific insights to make informed decisions on where to invest in 5G. With this information, companies can not only map strategic expansion, but also better manage assets, operations, customers and products.
For example, with this intelligence, carriers can gain insight into the most desired locations of specific populations and how they want to use bandwidth. They can use this data to arm themselves with a clear understanding of customer location and mobility, mapping existing infrastructure and competitive coverage against market requirements to pinpoint new opportunities. By creating complex customer profiles rich with demographic information like age, income and lifestyle preferences, the guesswork is eliminated for where the telco should or shouldn’t deploy new 5G towers.
Further, by mapping a population of consumers and businesses within a specific region and then aggregating that information by age, income or business type, for example, a vivid picture comes to life of the market opportunity for that area.
This type of granular location intelligence adds important context to existing data and is a key pillar to data integrity, which describes the overall quality and completeness of a dataset. When telcos can clearly understand factors such as boundaries, movement and the customers’ surroundings, predictive insights can be made regarding demographic changes and future telecom requirements within a certain location. This then serves as the basis for a data-backed 5G expansion strategy. Without it, businesses are burdened by the trial-and-error losses that are all too common with 5G build-outs.
Location precision's myriad benefits
Improved location precision has many benefits for telcos looking to pinpoint where to build, market and provision 5G. Among them are:
Better data: Broadening insights on commercial, residential and mixed-use locations through easy-to-consume, scalable datasets provide highly accurate in-depth analyses for marketing and meeting customer demand.
Better serviceability insights: Complete and accurate location insights allow for a comprehensive view of serviceable addresses where products and services can be delivered to current and new customers causing ROI to improve and customers to be adequately served.
Better subscriber returns: Companies that deploy fixed wireless services often experience plan cancellations due to inconsistencies of signal performance, which typically result from the misalignment of sites with network assets. Location-based data provides operators with the ability to adapt their networks for signal consistency and serviceability as sites and structures change.
The 5G future
The role of location intelligence in accelerating development of new broadband services and driving ROI in a 5G world cannot be overstated. It adds a critical element of data integrity that informs network optimization, customer targeting and service provisioning so telecom service providers can ensure their investments are not made with blind hope.
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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
Article | October 10, 2023
As your organization scales, inevitably, so too will its infrastructure needs. From physical spaces to personnel, devices to applications, physical security to cybersecurity – all these resources will continue to grow to meet the changing needs of your business operations.
To manage your changing infrastructure throughout its entire lifecycle, your organization needs to implement a robust infrastructure lifecycle management program that’s designed to meet your particular business needs.
In particular, IT asset lifecycle management (ITALM) is becoming increasingly important for organizations across industries. As threats to organizations’ cybersecurity become more sophisticated and successful cyberattacks become more common, your business needs (now, more than ever) to implement an infrastructure lifecycle management strategy that emphasizes the security of your IT infrastructure.
In this article, we’ll explain why infrastructure management is important. Then we’ll outline steps your organization can take to design and implement a program and provide you with some of the most important infrastructure lifecycle management best practices for your business.
What Is the Purpose of Infrastructure Lifecycle Management?
No matter the size or industry of your organization, infrastructure lifecycle management is a critical process. The purpose of an infrastructure lifecycle management program is to protect your business and its infrastructure assets against risk.
Today, protecting your organization and its customer data from malicious actors means taking a more active approach to cybersecurity. Simply put, recovering from a cyber attack is more difficult and expensive than protecting yourself from one. If 2020 and 2021 have taught us anything about cybersecurity, it’s that cybercrime is on the rise and it’s not slowing down anytime soon.
As risks to cybersecurity continue to grow in number and in harm, infrastructure lifecycle management and IT asset management are becoming almost unavoidable. In addition to protecting your organization from potential cyberattacks, infrastructure lifecycle management makes for a more efficient enterprise, delivers a better end user experience for consumers, and identifies where your organization needs to expand its infrastructure.
Some of the other benefits that come along with comprehensive infrastructure lifecycle management program include:
More accurate planning;
Centralized and cost-effective procurement;
Streamlined provisioning of technology to users;
More efficient maintenance;
Secure and timely disposal.
A robust infrastructure lifecycle management program helps your organization to keep track of all the assets running on (or attached to) your corporate networks. That allows you to catalog, identify and track these assets wherever they are, physically and digitally.
While this might seem simple enough, infrastructure lifecycle management and particularly ITALM has become more complex as the diversity of IT assets has increased. Today organizations and their IT teams are responsible for managing hardware, software, cloud infrastructure, SaaS, and connected device or IoT assets. As the number of IT assets under management has soared for most organizations in the past decade, a comprehensive and holistic approach to infrastructure lifecycle management has never been more important.
Generally speaking, there are four major stages of asset lifecycle management. Your organization’s infrastructure lifecycle management program should include specific policies and processes for each of the following steps:
Planning. This is arguably the most important step for businesses and should be conducted prior to purchasing any assets. During this stage, you’ll need to identify what asset types are required and in what number; compile and verify the requirements for each asset; and evaluate those assets to make sure they meet your service needs.
Acquisition and procurement. Use this stage to identify areas for purchase consolidation with the most cost-effective vendors, negotiate warranties and bulk purchases of SaaS and cloud infrastructure assets. This is where lack of insights into actual asset usage can potentially result in overpaying for assets that aren’t really necessary. For this reason, timely and accurate asset data is crucial for effective acquisition and procurement.
Maintenance, upgrades and repair. All assets eventually require maintenance, upgrades and repairs. A holistic approach to infrastructure lifecycle management means tracking these needs and consolidating them into a single platform across all asset types.
Disposal. An outdated or broken asset needs to be disposed of properly, especially if it contains sensitive information. For hardware, assets that are older than a few years are often obsolete, and assets that fall out of warranty are typically no longer worth maintaining. Disposal of cloud infrastructure assets is also critical because data stored in the cloud can stay there forever.
Now that we’ve outlined the purpose and basic stages of infrastructure lifecycle management, it’s time to look at the steps your organization can take to implement it.
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Application Infrastructure
Article | June 6, 2022
Introduction
It is hard to manage a modern firm without a convenient and adaptable IT infrastructure. When properly set up and networked, technology can improve back-office processes, increase efficiency, and simplify communication. IT infrastructure can be utilized to supply services or resources both within and outside of a company, as well as to its customers. IT infrastructure when adequately deployed aids organizations in achieving their objectives and increasing profits.
IT infrastructure is made up of numerous components that must be integrated for your company's infrastructure to be coherent and functional. These components work in unison to guarantee that your systems and business as a whole run smoothly.
Enterprise IT Infrastructure Trends
Consumption-based pricing models are becoming more popular among enterprise purchasers, a trend that began with software and has now spread to hardware. This transition from capital to operational spending lowers risk, frees up capital, and improves flexibility. As a result, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) revenues increased by 53% from 2015 to 2016, making them the fastest-growing cloud and infrastructure services segments. The transition to as-a-service models is significant given that a unit of computing or storage in the cloud can be quite cheaper in terms of the total cost of ownership than a unit on-premises.
While businesses have been migrating their workloads to the public cloud for years, there has been a new shift among large corporations. Many companies, including Capital One, GE, Netflix, Time Inc., and others, have downsized or removed their private data centers in favor of shifting their operations to the cloud.
Cybersecurity remains a high priority for the C-suite and the board of directors. Attacks are increasing in number and complexity across all industries, with 80% of technology executives indicating that their companies are unable to construct a robust response. Due to lack of cybersecurity experts, many companies can’t get the skills they need on the inside, so they have to use managed security services.
Future of Enterprise IT Infrastructure
Companies can adopt the 'As-a-Service' model to lower entry barriers and begin testing future innovations on the cloud's basis. Domain specialists in areas like healthcare and manufacturing may harness AI's potential to solve some of their businesses' most pressing problems.
Whether in a single cloud or across several clouds, businesses want an architecture that can expand to support the rapid evolution of their apps and industry for decades. For enterprise-class visibility and control across all clouds, the architecture must provide a common control plane that supports native cloud Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) as well as enhanced networking and security features.
Conclusion
The scale of disruption in the IT infrastructure sector is unparalleled, presenting enormous opportunities and hazards for industry stakeholders and their customers. Technology infrastructure executives must restructure their portfolios and rethink their go-to-market strategies to drive growth. They should also invest in the foundational competencies required for long-term success, such as digitization, analytics, and agile development.
Data center companies that can solve the industry's challenges, as well as service providers that can scale quickly without limits and provide intelligent outcome-based models. This helps their clients achieve their business objectives through a portfolio of 'As-a-Service' models, will have a bright future.
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