Demand for more effective and comprehensive collaboration is changing the way leading organizations are managing their infrastructure, giving birth to a 'quiet revolution' called 'infrastructure anywhere.'
According to the Infrastructure Executive Council (IEC), Infrastructure Anywhere means overcoming the challenges posed by long distances and aggressive shared services consolidation. The IEC says infrastructure anywhere aims to get service anywhere business is done while shrinking the infrastructure's physical footprint and dispersing infrastructure staff to locations possessing advantages in cost or expertise.
IEC said that organizations that are leading this revolution are those who give priority to four specific areas, namely service provisioning, performance across distances, collaboration platforms, and timely technology deployment.
'[Leaders] realize "Ëœfast-provisioning' is a component-level view that misses the economics. Instead, they look at the service delivery value chain, understand the drivers of the service value by customer and tailor their service practices to increase both economies of scale and value delivered,' said the IEC.
For performance across distances, IEC said that leaders know that latency is often not a network disease. They improve core compute center performance globally through smarter process and measurement, improved testing, and simpler engineering.
For collaboration, IEC said that leaders focus on defining and deploying effective platforms for unstructured communication and collaboration, serving both dispersed infrastructure personnel and business partners.
Lastly, leaders of the 'information anywhere' revolution make timely technology deployments by mapping technology maturity to underlying business needs.
'The Infrastructure Executive Council is working - through initiatives like its member-led Vision for Infrastructure group - to develop social tools like its Technology Adoption Risk Model, which organizes the experiences of many companies to inform organization-specific decisions around adoption of key technologies like storage virtualization, unified communications and WAN acceleration,' said Gregg Rosenberg, IEC Practice Manager.
IEC says that the leaders of Infrastructure Anywhere focus on the economically important evolution of IT infrastructure around the problems of business distance - both doing business at a distance and supporting business from a distance.