Creating Flexible Infrastructure that Changes with Business Demands
The speed of change for today’s business is accelerating as never before. That’s why new ways of procuring, implementing and using technology are vital to ensure companies stay competitive. Hybrid cloud platforms, composable infrastructure and automation can all play a role in making this change easier.
Moving faster is a big challenge for some IT departments more used to planning, testing, installing and maintaining big, slow-moving projects. But the days of focusing on building and running the most cost-efficient platform for the business are over. Today’s organisation needs technology that can move as quickly as the rest of the business and support it as it changes and grows. That means even internal systems must move at ‘cloud speed’.
IT departments need to think about continuous development and building infrastructure that is capable of changing and evolving constantly – just like the competition does. Product development is now measured in days or weeks for many companies, and that in turn makes new demands on IT infrastructure.
But these demands can be met thanks to composable infrastructure and platforms that can be reconfigured in close to real-time. This kind of infrastructure often relies on cloud-based systems that can be scaled up, or down, almost instantly. New types of procurement and service contracts mean that in-house technology can work in much the same way.
The challenge for many companies is that their infrastructure has evolved over time in response to demand from individual departments. Often this means systems that work on different standards and siloed or legacy systems that can’t talk, or share data, with one another.
Adapting open standards and APIs can help. The best systems now rely on open standards and on technology functions that can be moved around almost like building blocks. This means that a computing function, such as storage, is available to systems across the business and not tied to one workload or function.
Much simpler enterprise planning systems make it possible to reconfigure systems in a matter of hours rather than weeks.
Building platforms from components like this also means it is relatively easy to repeat the process for another part of the business, or for a new product line, without the expense of creating a brand new system from scratch.
The challenge is to do two different things at once – keep existing systems running efficiently while also having the time and capital to invest in new platforms.
One key tool to make this juggling act possible is the automation of existing processes to reduce the administrative burden on staff and on IT departments.
Systems which can deal with customer queries and responses, automated content management systems and business process development and change can all help the business react more quickly to the changing needs.
Getting core systems running quickly and efficiently frees up staff time to focus on building and planning for the future.
FUJIFILM Business Innovation has a wealth of tools to help automate many of these processes, including the extraction, capture and classification of data from documents. We can even provide robotic automation solutions to support staff by dealing with repetitive and monotonous work tasks and freeing up time for more productive and strategic work.