Tackling the digital transformation 'hype' to drive results

‘Digital transformation’ has become a major buzzword in recent years with organisations around the globe continuing to invest heavily in major transformation initiatives focused on integrating digital technologies such as social, mobile, analytics and cloud.

And it’s not just the private sector where digital transformation is taking place. The government sector received a commitment of $70 million for digital transformation projects over the next four years in the 2017–18 Australian federal Budget as part of the next phase of the transformation agenda.

So while it often seems overhyped, digital transformation should be seen as an opportunity. Digital transformation is the way an organisation adapts to change and reinvents itself using technology. Leaders that are proactive and see the value in improving IT agility are seeing greater innovation, growth and development.

Departments and agencies need to be mindful of what their risks are while undergoing a digital transformation project which should include uptime and availability shortfalls. A move towards digitalisation signifies that more of what government does will be online and cloud enabled, thus making government more susceptible to incidences such as a ransomware attack.

Here are five tips to drive the greatest success in a digital transformation project:

1. Become agnostic to minimise disruption

To make life easier, an organisation should focus on finding technologies that remove dependence on any specific part of its infrastructure such as storage arrays or even the hypervisor. By doing this, enterprise applications can become more portable and be moved to the platforms that make sense at that time without disruption.

Traditional IT infrastructures are built on technologies that are not open. For example, hardware-based replication requires identical storage hardware at the second site. However, truly hardware-agnostic replication allows for unobstructed compatibility between storage systems and cloud platforms, providing ultimate cost-saving freedom without complication or impediment. This also allows users to leverage the latest storage vendors and network components.

2. Leverage multiple clouds

Moving applications without downtime or disruption between clouds is very difficult to achieve. However, having software-defined replication products that are written into the virtualised layer can solve this issue and make cloud portability a reality.

It is also imperative that the solution enables the IT team to move data, workloads and applications to another destination with a simple mouse click. This enables easy migration into hybrid cloud and keeps data in two separate locations. Keeping data on premises and off, for example, can potentially save organisations the cost of another physical location.

This is easier said than done, because at their core, clouds have a virtualised layer. Most clouds are built on a specific hypervisor. If organisations run VMware on premise but CSP built their cloud on HyperV, it becomes difficult to easily move workloads between them, unless the organisation has a technology that abstracts the hypervisor itself.

3. Greater agility, elasticity and scale with hybrid cloud

As the department or agency progresses, grows and changes, the services it provides will require the infrastructure and capability of a growing data centre. Looking toward the next few years, it would be prudent for governments to look towards data centre solution providers that can provide hybrid cloud capability, allowing for agility, elasticity and scale. This should be true from both an infrastructure and commercial, or cost and billing perspective.

4. Software-defined ‘everything’ for greater flexibility

Software is key to implementing a flexible data centre strategy. If governments are tied to isolated physical assets, they are inherently locked in to the capability of those. This means departments will not have the ability to adjust and makes it more difficult to move to the cloud. Moving intelligence to software gives governments a level of flexibility that isn’t possible when it is held only on isolated physical assets.

5. Make your IT resilient

Resilience is defined as the ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change. The ongoing wave of aggressive ransomware attacks highlights the increasing reliance on IT, and this is set to get even bigger as IoT concepts come to fruition. It’s important that departments/agencies are resilient in the face of an attack and can bounce back quickly with as minimal disruption as possible.

Change is the new normal and it is no surprise that government must find ways to embrace digital transformation, and the opportunities it presents, to be stronger and more resilient than ever before. Having a simplified and automated DRaaS solution in place can help government to focus on their strategic digital initiatives while providing greater peace of mind in the event of an outage.

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