Legacy consumption models for IT are no longer meeting the needs of today’s businesses, and organizations of all sizes are moving to more flexible consumption-based IT models, per separate research studies by TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) and Forbes Insights.
The potential impact of this shift is transformative. According to the ESG study, titled Flexible IT Models Drive Efficiency and Innovation, organizations that have embraced flexible IT models have been able to:
- Reduce infrastructure costs by 16% in the past year
- Experience 44% fewer problematic public cloud incidents, such as application outages, data loss and security breaches
- Accelerate application development cycles by an average of three business weeks
- Refactor workloads from one platform to another 53% faster than companies that are less advanced in using flexible IT
These benefits translate into important business advantages, as described in the Forbes research, titled Delivering on Demand: Momentum Builds Toward Flexible IT:
- Organizations with flexible IT were 27% more likely to see revenue growth of more than 5% in the past three years versus organizations using legacy purchased-based consumption models.
- Flexible IT delivered higher levels of user satisfaction, speedier deployments, faster decision-making and greater agility in adapting to market changes.
The Shift to Flexible IT
Flexible IT, as the term implies, is about choice. It is about defining the optimum way for the IT team to deliver IT as a service and the optimum way for users to consume it.
The key is to deploy an infrastructure and cloud platform that gives you the flexibility to choose the best delivery model for each workload, application and use case. The ESG and Forbes Insights studies describe several key elements of a successful flexible IT model. These are:
- Cloud-centered: ESG: “Multi-year planning cycles have become outdated almost overnight. Organizations need the agility to deploy, scale and provision resources on the fly based on rapidly changing user and business requirements. Cloud computing operating models deliver this flexibility, allowing infrastructure users to define requirements while provisioning and management of the infrastructure is handled ‘behind the scenes’ in a highly automated fashion. Teams that expand cloud operations beyond the public cloud and extend it to on-premises and hybrid environments optimize their ability to adapt with agility.”
- Consumption-based: ESG: “A cornerstone of flexible IT is the proliferation of as-a-service consumption models throughout the environment. Traditionally, as-a-service consumption models have been delivered by public cloud providers, but on-premises infrastructure and IT teams are increasingly deploying these models.” Forbes insights: “While all-cloud and all-on-premises organizations exist, most fall along a continuum between these two IT consumption patterns. Our findings show that consumption-based IT models allow organizations the agility and flexibility to quickly adapt to business requirements.”
- Fast, agile and responsive: Forbes Insights: “Flexible IT-based computing models provide a path to agility and speed. There are many options for developing a modern architecture built on flexible IT-based models. These include infrastructure as a service, application programming interfaces, containers and leasing equipment maintained by third-party providers. Flexible IT means faster and more responsive ways of working—IT staff no longer need to devote time to fixing, patching and debugging, and instead can devote more time to engaging with the business.” ESG: “One of the key elements of flexible IT is the ability of the organization to evaluate numerous environments—across private cloud, public cloud and edge—and to select the environment that best suits the needs of the workload in question.”
Taking the Next Step
Business and IT leaders agree that it is time to move away from legacy purchased-based consumption models. They say these models limit their ability to ensure business continuity, pace IT modernization to meet the demands of the business, address increasing IT complexity and deploy new technology with speed and agility.
There has to be a better way—and there is. Flexible IT is a transformative model that is paving the way to as-a-service IT that is faster, more agile, less complex and more responsive to the needs of customers, employees and everyone else across today’s more dynamic ecosystems.
For more information on how your organization can successfully evolve to a flexible IT model with speed, simplicity, security, agility and confidence, please visit Dell Technologies and review the additional articles and resources on this site.
