6 strategies to strengthen your IT foundation

Organizations of all industries can benefit from an IT environment that delivers both agility and stability. But as organizations grow, IT environments built on multiple operating systems (OSs) can become complex and difficult to scale efficiently. By adopting these 6 best practices, you can simplify your IT infrastructure and automate manual processes to increase business agility and operational efficiency, enhance security, and address skills gaps.

IT organizations must deliver new applications, features, and services at a more efficient rate and across diverse environments. But many companies have accumulated a complex collection of resources that make it difficult to meet this need.

Standardization offers the key to efficient, effective IT operation and innovation, and helps IT staff to focus on business-critical initiatives by allowing you to:

• Standardize on a single, enterprise open source OS to get more work done on fewer servers.
• Adopt an open application platform to extend the possibilities of cloud operations.
• Deploy a unified platform of open source components that work well with your existing technologies and processes.

Controlling costs is more critical than ever. But neglecting to invest properly in technology can create IT infrastructure that fails to deliver needed uptime, agility, and efficiency. 

Embracing open source can help you create a stable IT foundation, while reducing costs by allowing you to:

• Adopt a commercially supported open source OS that works consistently in any environment.
• Keep your organization flexible to adopt emerging technologies while maintaining existing systems.
• Benefit from a large open source community that delivers iterative improvements for faster innovation at scale.
• Take advantage of the interoperability and cost savings of an open hybrid or multicloud approach.

Cloud environments offer the agility and elasticity needed to rapidly respond to changes and scale to meet customer demands, while increasing the efficiency of core business systems. But this is difficult to achieve with standalone cloud environments based on proprietary technologies. 

Open cloud technologies that have interoperability with hybrid and multicloud environments provide the full benefits of cloud operations by allowing you to:

• Manage and automate cloud computing with open software tools across cloud and on-premise environments.
• Standardize on an open OS to run applications and workloads consistently from a common user interface (UI) in cloud environments.
• Deploy an open application platform to help you move applications between cloud environments and increase the efficiency of DevOps by moving development across cloud environments.

Organizations must protect their data against increasingly sophisticated attacks to avoid costly and destructive data breaches and remain in adherence to stringent data privacy regulations.

While no one solution can do this on its own, open platforms that layer security throughout your infrastructure can help you increase your focus on security by allowing you to:

• Simplify protection with a standardized operating environment that requires fewer system variations, making it simpler to keep all systems up to date with the latest security patches.
• Automate consistent adherence to privacy laws with compliance as code.
• Extend your focus on security into cloud environments with containers that are managed with automation to mitigate human errors.

IT environments built on multiple platforms and complex technology layers that often include compartmentalized workflows and conventional tools can become too much for IT teams to manage efficiently.

Reducing the manual steps involved in managing complex environments requires a number of approaches, including:

• Adopt a standardized OS to simplify your IT infrastructure and operations.
• Promote consistency with automation to give teams space to focus on more valuable tasks.
• Deploy an open automation platform with playbooks written in a natural language that are simpler for your team to understand and use.

To succeed in today’s disruptive digital economy, organizations must know how to remain agile and optimize their existing resources. However, outdated approaches to the design, management, and operation of IT environments can slow the pace of innovation.

Automation can help you stay focused on innovation by allowing you to:

• Eliminate routine tasks to allow your IT team to focus on strategic initiatives.
• Reduce development time and effort by automating configuration, provisioning, workflow orchestration, and application deployment.
• Improve the efficiency and consistency of existing processes to reduce costs and mitigate risks.