Business Agility Starts with IT

It’s exciting times for IT and businesses. The promise of virtualization and cloud computing to greatly improve the efficiency and speed in which to bring applications and services to market is huge. However, the problem for each step along the virtualization to cloud maturity model is that the technology deployed does not complement their existing infrastructure, is dissimilar, or a poor derivative of something they already own.

As a business grows, it is inevitable that IT demands and requirements will evolve, and as it evolves, it is important that IT is able to build upon existing investments rather than redesigning the IT infrastructure to cater to the growth.

Consequently, a business’ ability to be agile is only as effective as its IT agility. In many businesses, however, IT agility is impaired by traditional architectures in which technologies are connected by static one-to-one connections.

Points of friction
The result of these fixed links is an inflexible infrastructure with many points of friction between people, applications and data that make it very difficult to accommodate sudden changes in business requirement - an unexpected surge in online orders, or a dropped network link to a remote location.

Traditionally, businesses have responded to such rigidity by customising links between users and their resources, deploying more servers (or upgrading them), increasing bandwidth, purchasing more storage or adding more IT staffers. While these measures may offer some relief from current problems, they typically increase complexity and bump up operating costs. There’s also no guarantee that the same issues will not crop up as the business expands.

Ultimately, the type of IT model needed is a one that is simple and yet gives businesses the control that they want. The traditional one-to-one infrastructure affords a high level of control, but becomes very complicated as applications, devices, users are added to it, and it does not scale. In contrast, an environment where everything is outsourced, such as a public cloud model, offers the simplicity of not having to worry about capacity, access and connectivity issues. However, the trade off is the loss of control over the infrastructure. What if you can have the tools to build an infrastructure that is simple and flexible, and yet gives the control and context?

Strategic points of control
The answer – a dynamic services model that creates an intelligent layer in the network between users and their resources and which is extensible and reusable.  Since mission-critical applications are an integral part of business operations these days, a vital component of this intelligent layer has to be devices that are application fluent.  These application fluent devices will be the strategic points of control that intercepts and integrates all sorts of information regarding the application traffic, and then instructs the network accordingly – distinguishing good traffic from the bad, sending the right requests to the right servers, off-loading processor-intensive tasks from the servers in order to increase response times or spinning up new virtual machines in a virtual environment to ensure availability when traffic spikes.

Achieving IT agility
To make their IT infrastructure – and the business – more agile, enterprises need to create an agile infrastructure that ensures people, applications, and data can adapt to business changes and scale seamlessly with any level of growth.

F5 can help. Its solutions replaces the physical, one-to-one connections between technologies in the IT infrastructure – from client devices to application servers to data storage and everything in between – with dynamic, intelligent interactions that deliver the best result based on current conditions.

F5 application delivery devices are modular, designed with expansion and customization in mind. With this approach you can incorporate new functionality – from Web acceleration to web application security -- giving businesses high availability, improved performance, application security, and access control, all in one unit. More importantly, it creates strategic points of control that work in an efficient, cohesive manner that is easier to manage and adapt as business and technology needs change.

Regardless of whether a business has a traditional 3-tier IT architecture or is just starting to deal with virtualization, whether it is exploring with internal cloud or going to a totally external cloud environment, Businesses can use these control points to add, move, or redefine services on demand, making it easy to create, modify, and scale IT infrastructure to align with the changing demands of the business while supporting long-term objectives.

“Unified application and data delivery :
         A model for creating a dynamic IT
        infrastructure” | Whitepaper

“Singtel Alatum” | Video

“First American Corporation”
         | Case Study