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6 ways to strengthen your IT foundation

September 28, 2020•
Resource type: Checklist

How mid-sized organizations can improve stability, flexibility, and security

From retail to healthcare to manufacturing, mid-sized organizations need digital backbones that deliver both agility and stability. However, IT infrastructures built on multiple operating systems—or multiple public and private clouds—can create undue complexity. By adopting these six best practices, you can automate routine tasks and simplify your IT infrastructure to improve productivity, reduce costs, bolster security, and accelerate innovation.

1 Speed innovation with automation 

To succeed in today’s disruptive digital economy, mid-size organizations must optimize resources and quickly pivot to capture market opportunities. However, outdated approaches to the design, management, and operation of IT infrastructure can slow the pace of innovation. 

  • Reduce development time and effort by automating configuration, provisioning, workflow orchestration, and application deployment.
  • Free your IT resources to focus on strategic initiatives by eliminating routine tasks.
  • Improve existing processes, reduce costs, and mitigate security and compliance risks with an effective automation strategy and platform.

2 Overcome complexity 

One of the main concerns for IT is the speed at which technology stacks and related tasks grow. Intricate IT architectures built on multiple platforms and complex technology layers can quickly become too much for humans to manage efficiently. Compartmentalized workflows, proprietary languages, and legacy tools further complicate the life of IT teams. Reducing the time and manual tasks involved in managing complex environments requires a number of approaches.

  • Capitalize on consistency by using automation, which gives teams space to focus on more valuable tasks. 
  • Deploy an open automation platform with playbooks written in a natural language that are easy for anyone to understand, adopt, and quickly begin using. 
  • Build a common and open intelligent sharing foundation that can deliver a variety of services and IT resources using fewer servers. 
  • Adopt a standard operating environment, which will help you simplify your IT infrastructure and operations—and prepare for the future.

3 Capitalize on the cloud

Cloud technology offers agility and elasticity, allowing you to rapidly respond to changes and scale to meet customer demands. Mid-sized organizations rely on cloud technology to increase the efficiency of core business systems. However, you also need to move beyond standalone clouds based on proprietary technologies. Open cloud technologies that integrate public, private, and hybrid clouds provide a proven foundation for today’s workloads and application development.

  • Manage and automate cloud computing with open software tools—even across hybrid clouds and all the way to the edge.
  • Standardize on an open operating system to enable your applications to work consistently in any cloud environment. 
  • Deploy an open container platform based on Kubernetes packages to help you effortlessly move apps from cloud to cloud.
  • Increase the efficiency of DevOps with open platforms that make it easy to move application development and usage across clouds.

4 Protect your organization with layered security 

Organizations must defend against increasingly sophisticated and malicious attacks. Meanwhile, as data privacy regulations become tougher, few mid-sized companies can risk the enormous price tag of a data breach, which can run into millions of dollars. Choosing open platforms that layer security throughout your infrastructure can increase the resistance to breaches.

  • Simplify protection with a standardized operating environment that requires fewer system variations, giving you more control over your environment and keeping systems up to date with the latest security patches. 
  • Automate consistent adherence to privacy laws with compliance as code. 
  • Extend your security into cloud computing with modern software strategies such as containers and microservices—all managed with automation to mitigate human errors. 
  • Use open source technologies to deploy, optimize, and add security for your applications and infrastructure.

5 Standardize your infrastructure

IT organizations must deliver new applications, features, and services—not only faster but also across diverse environments. But many mid-sized companies have, over time, accumulated a complex maze of resources that make it difficult to meet this need. Standardization offers the key to efficient, effective IT operation and innovation. It also frees IT staff to focus on business-critical initiatives rather than sorting out interoperability issues.

  • Deploy a unified platform of open source components that work well with your existing technologies and processes. 
  • Standardize on a single, enterprise open source operating system to get more work done using fewer servers.
  • Adopt an open container orchestration platform to extend the possibilities of cloud computing with containers and microservices.

6 Save costs and increase stability with open source

As all types of companies face a fiercely competitive global business environment, the need to control costs has become more critical than ever. At the same time, skimping on technology can result in an IT infrastructure that fails to deliver needed uptime, agility, and efficiency. Open source software can cost-effectively form the foundation of a highly stable IT backbone. 

  • Adopt a commercially supported open source operating system that works consistently in any environment. 
  • Use an open container platform to easily manage your applications across cloud and on-premise infrastructure— including multicloud. 
  • Benefit from a large open source community that delivers iterative improvements for faster innovation at scale. 
  • Reduce costs with an effective automation strategy based on an open automation platform. 
  • Gain the interoperability and cost savings of an open hybrid cloud approach.
Read the e-book

To learn how to modernize your IT environment to create a stronger IT foundation, read the e-book.

Contact sales

To connect with a Red Hat sales representative about solutions for mid-sized organizations, contact us.

Tags:Automation, Cloud, Management, Open source, Security

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