CIOs are under a great deal of pressure to rapidly deliver outputs for their business and, in most cases, they are having to work within a limited IT budget, according to Rob Makin, Group Director, Enterprise Business Group, Lenovo ANZ.
Part of the problem, Makin told Dynamic Business, is that digital disruption has resulted in huge increases in data.
“Consequently, SMBs are having to process data with increasing agility in order to compete and grow,” he said.
“For instance, four servers are being deployed every minute to cope with forty new smartphones.”
Makin identified three trends that CIOs can embrace in their organisations to reduce costs and boost efficiency:
Hybrid cloud
“While the public cloud has its place and will continue to grow, there is growing demand for hybrid cloud for businesses of all sizes – from enterprises to SMBs. SMBs enjoy the functionality, immediacy and feature set of public cloud but they are increasingly turning to hybrid cloud. It enables SMBs to harness the agility of public cloud while also affording them the benefits of an on-premises system; namely, a higher level of service and control, including over data security. While public cloud is, on the face of it, easy to manage, control and service levels are lower because it’s a big shared platform.”
Hyper-converged infrastructure
“Companies can deploy a hyper-converged infrastructure in their existing datacentres without having to rip out and replace their existing infrastructure. Instead, they can operate the two in complementary fashion until the existing datacentre equipment reaches end of life. In addition, the hyper-converged infrastructure’s small footprint means that businesses do not have to allocate considerable datacentre real estate, power and cooling resources to its operation, helping keep costs at a minimum.”
Software-defined storage (SDS)
“To achieve the speed necessary to cope with increases in data, SMBs are having to move away from traditional three-tier software architecture towards SDS. Benefits include enabling businesses to take advantage of advanced backup and restoration capabilities to protect their data in the event of a system outage. SDS reduces costs by simplifying management and enabling companies to deploy lower-cost or heterogeneous storage hardware. Further, the sophistication of the software used can help businesses meet their information security and retention challenges.”
