Steering Clear of Technology Dead-Ends: Is Your IT Investment Taking the Right Turn?

Choosing new technology can feel like heading into a roundabout when your GPS loses satellite reception. You have to make a decision, and fast, but there are many possible options, and not all outcomes will work out well. Too many wrong turns will work out expensive, and slow your progress. How, then, do you make the best choice for navigating the future?

From Legacy to Digital Transformation

The word ‘futureproofing’ is used a lot, but unless a solution respects your past, and supports your present, then it is of limited use in preparing for your future. Your legacy apps are still there for a reason: they’re important to your business function. Today’s more demanding modern apps make the process ever-more challenging. Advanced AI capabilities are already emerging, so the future is already right there in front of you. For our money, IBM’s Power 9 is leading the pack in bringing together your business past with the road ahead.

Backed into a Technology Corner

We recently worked with an organisation that depended on an old ERP system from the 1990s, running on unsupported hardware. The business didn’t have the budget for a big ERP implementation. Their IT staff numbers had reduced – and finding anyone with skills on the old technologies was problematic in any case. Securing that environment was a nightmare. It was a high-risk situation, and knowing one wrong move could be catastrophic, the remaining IT team was walking on eggshells.

Nurturing old technologies can prevent adoption of the new. Opportunities, whether for IoT, mobility, collaboration or any of a number of modern applications, are lost. While most organisations may not be dependent on 30-year-old systems, like this customer, legacy apps are a consideration for most.

We love the hair-raising problems at Team, so getting to grips with a decades-old system was right up our street. When this was put in place, New Kids on the Block topped the charts and hand-held phones were the size of a house brick, so it was clearly time to bring the customer up-to-date fast, without giving them whiplash.

From Old to New

We ran new systems for the customer in the cloud, tested the software and proved that their operations could run on IBM Power 9, either via Power as a Service or using on-premise machines. Not only can the business now securely run its legacy and more modern applications, but also take advantage of AI and analytics as well – all without the big up-front costs they could otherwise have faced. Best of all, the customer’s IT team can spend less time wrangling dated systems, and the breathing space will give them room to guide the business into the digital era.

Avoiding Storage Slowdown

It would be remiss to talk about avoiding wrong turns without addressing storage. Your choice here is the difference between application bottlenecks and application performance. That is because storage limitations are among the most common causes of application slowdown. With Flash storage fast becoming now very affordable, speeding things up isn’t hard.

Important though it is, speed isn’t the only consideration. There’s a new breed of devices on the market, offering software-defined management, the insights of advanced analytics, and a host of new security measures. If the new Mandatory Data Breach (MDB) laws are a concern, which they should be, IBM’s data protection software is worth checking out.

In fact, both Power and storage environments have security advantages, with advanced encryption now available on even entry-level systems. We are confident putting our trust in the systems that went largely unaffected by waves of ransomware sweeping the world, and that solve the decades-old problems of essential legacy systems, and we’ve never been let down.

Time to face the toughest challenges in your data centre, from legacy to the future? Contact our expert problem-solvers.