The role of IT has always been to
enable business success, yet it has
become increasingly challenging to align IT with the business. Applications
and users form the primary intersection
between business and IT. Business today
runs on applications (programs). The closest points of intersection between business
and IT are applications and the users who
depend on them to do their jobs, buy products, obtain support and the like.
“The more successful IT is in ensuring
that all users have fast, secure, low-cost
access to their applications from any location, the more likely they are to be viewed
as an enabler by business executives rather
than roadblocks to business strategies,”
says Omar Yakar, CEO of Agile 360.
“Unfortunately, most companies are facing
a ‘perfect storm’ of opposing market forces
separating users and applications by time,
distance and organization — all of which
increases the challenge of application
delivery.”
Smart Business talked with Yakar about
what businesses can do to address these
challenges.
What is causing these shifts?
On the one side, globalization, mobility, offshoring and e-commerce are moving users
farther away from headquarters. At the same
time, trends such as data center consolidation, business continuity, security and regulatory pressures are making applications
less accessible to users. As the velocity of
change increases in the increasingly dynamic world, it is virtually impossible for IT to
predict and mitigate all the variables that
could impact an application’s success.
All of this is having a profoundly negative
impact on the business utility of mission-critical applications at most companies. As
the ‘noise’ between applications and users
grows, application performance declines,
security risk increases and costs go
through the roof. Worse yet, IT’s ability to
respond quickly to business requirements
has never been under more pressure.
How should this change be addressed?
The approach that made IT successful in
the past no longer solves today’s problems.
The old cycle of deploying the fastest PCs,
buying the fastest servers you can afford
and keeping it all running efficiently with
as many smart IT people as possible in
each location has to end. The rate of business change is now much faster than our
hard-coded infrastructures were designed
to handle.
You can’t break this cycle simply by trying to reign in all the variables. Users feel
locked down with increasing restrictions
on their environment. And application
projects are slowed down due to infrastructure limitations. What’s needed is a
services-oriented mindset that enables you
to loosely couple applications and users
without limiting flexibility on either end.
How is this change implemented?
It starts by shifting attention away from
technology-focused silos like networking,
security and management systems and
instead focusing on the business line of
sight from applications in the data center
to users — wherever they may be.
To change our way of thinking, we may
also need to change our language. Most IT
organizations still talk about deploying applications. When you ‘deploy’ something, it requires lots of effort, takes a long
time and usually ends up costing more
than you expected. The effort is so complex, rigid and slow that you often end up
deploying things to people whether or not
they really wanted them in the first place.
‘Delivery’ is a much more dynamic and
flexible model. Cable TV providers, for
example, deliver content to any user in any
location, whenever it is requested. They
don’t care what kind of home entertainment system you have or how often it
changes. Delivery is fast, flexible, bidirectional, responsive and efficient.
How is this view different?
Instead of focusing on a technology silo
(routers, servers, security), the focus is
along the line of sight between applications
and users, providing an infrastructure with
the agility to deliver any application to any
user in the best way possible, regardless of
the change happening all around.
Instead of trying to control all the variables, IT shifts its focus to controlling the
delivery network. This starts by controlling
the initial delivery of applications at the
point of origin using technologies like virtualization, optimization and streaming —
all of which are designed to move each
unique type of application traffic over the
network in the most effective way possible. Next, you need to give users easy,
secure access to applications while keeping application data protected. Third, you
need to optimize all application traffic over
long-distance networks. Finally, an application delivery strategy will monitor the
experience from the perspective of the
end-user.
Users are happy because they get the
applications they want, fast and on
demand. IT is happy because costs and
security risks are reduced dramatically.
And business is happy because IT is able to
respond quickly to what the business
needs.
OMAR YAKAR is CEO of Agile360 in Irvine. Reach him at (949)
253-4106 or [email protected].