The world of IT is changing faster and more furiously than ever, thanks to digitalization. Not so long ago, optimizing IT costs and performance was your company’s ticket to competitive success. Today, digitalization is your competitive weapon—and frankly, a constant struggle. Users and customers clamor endlessly for 24/7/365 access to information and services. Addressing their urgent demands—whether it’s getting an app on a company-owned tablet or delivering an online service to customers —is a tricky balancing act.
After all, your other projects haven’t gone away. You still need to optimize costs and performance. Only now you have to deliver new digital services at the same time.
How can you begin to strike the right balance?
The answer lies, in part, with your IT infrastructure. Physical, virtual, or cloud, is it flexible enough to accommodate digital services while still operating at optimum levels? If not, take action now. Because believe me, your competitors are either already there, or well on their way.
A good first step is to take a look at your server architecture. Can you gain critical efficiencies by moving servers from one platform or data center to another, or to the cloud? Adopting a hybrid IT model often yields immediate rewards. In fact, organizations often turn to hybrid IT—with its mix of platforms, virtualization options, private clouds, public clouds, internal IT resources, colocation, and hosting—to strengthen the agility, security, and reliability of their IT services.
Public and private cloud use dominates hybrid IT projects. According to a recent index, by 2020, cloud data centers will process more than 92% of server workloads. Traditional data centers will process only about 8%. The question is, do you have the time and staff to migrate your servers to a new cloud platform? And can you afford the downtime associated with moving dozens, or even hundreds, of them? If you answered “no” to both questions, you’re not alone.
Identifying the right solution
The server and application migration market is crowded with solutions, including “free” options provided by operating system platforms. Your goal is to find the one that strengthens your IT team’s agility and responsiveness while helping to balance traditional optimization efforts with business innovation. When researching your options, be sure to get answers to these three questions:
Does the solution support multiple platforms?
Using point solutions for multiple platforms across your organization can only lead to great complexity and inefficiencies. Look for a multiplatform solution that performs anywhere-to-anywhere migrations across multiple operating systems, virtualization options, and cloud platforms.
Does the solution meet your requirements for IT service continuity?
You can’t afford downtime. Look for solutions with automated testing, preferably sandboxed, to ensure near-zero downtime at cutover. Now, more than ever, you need to help your business keep users and customers engaged with key applications and services.
Does the solution help you meet your migration timelines and budget?
You need fast, automated, “push-button” solutions that keep you on track and within budget, preferably with integrated project planning capabilities. Having full visibility into project progress across the enterprise can lead to faster time-to-value and greatest ROI.
Don’t underestimate the value of a trusted provider
Keeping up with the demand for new digital services often requires an accelerated and highly efficient adoption of cloud and hybrid IT models. That’s why it’s important to choose a solution from a trusted provider—one with the experience and capabilities to help you plan, track, and execute large server migration projects across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures. Micro Focus has performed more than a million global migrations, which is why IT professionals trust our cloud and data center migration solutions to help them migrate servers from anywhere to anywhere—quickly, cost-effectively, and with minimal risk.
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