Organizations rely on their applications to function and conduct business. In fact, growth around virtualization, cloud, and digitization has placed even more reliance on apps and your data center. But what happens when these apps are legacy and pose a migration challenge? Or, you start to lose visibility into some of your most critical resources within a cloud or data center ecosystem?
Today, organizations are looking for better ways to tie in infrastructure deployment with good application and data management. In working with almost every vertical and industry in today’s market – data and, most of all, applications continue to be severe stopping points. With ever-increasing spend for virtualization, data center, and cloud technologies – more organizations are running into application and data management challenges. And, these are serious challenges as well. For example, some issues include:
- Apps are posing challenges around complexity and management.
- Applications are forcing administrators to create manual management processes.
- Applications and data sets are in silos and can’t be optimized appropriately.
- Applications and data sets with poor visibility create legacy infrastructure, thereby increasing complexity.
So now what? You have several hundred applications (and maybe even some that you don’t know about) all sitting in your environment. Do you have a good management console to work with? Are you introducing orchestration and automated tasks to manage the application better? Do you know how data is interacting with users and core apps?
Automation Enables Digital Transformations, Faster
There are some very powerful automation, data management, and visibility technologies in today’s market, allowing for the very granular control of applications and data flow. Furthermore, these platforms allow administrators to carefully manage their unique requirements and incorporate them into infrastructure deployment. So, if you’re facing serious application or data management challenges, remember that there are some great ways to overcome legacy issues with new digital solutions.
Before we move on – there’s one essential point to make: If you’re hoping for one last chance to hang on to that legacy app and let it keep running as-is – stop, and think about the cost to the business and your IT environment. Just because it’s working doesn’t mean your solution is still bringing your value.
To manage legacy applications, data points, and workloads – there are several things you have to consider:
- You will potentially have to hold on to legacy infrastructure.
- You’ll have to find people to spend time supporting the append frequently manual processes of management.
- You’ll need to potentially deprecate new, more optimal systems to support this app or data silo.
- Even if an application “still works,” – you’re still potentially introducing poor cost economics and even potential security risks.
To get beyond the legacy challenge, organizations will need to look at greater automated processes to manage their applications and help with infrastructure control and deployment. Consider this, a recent Gartner study noted that technologies with the ability to assemble and deliver information through automated engines proactively are fostering a movement from human – to machine-generated business processes.
So, if you’re an admin reading this, and you know you have a legacy app in your environment – I’m sure you’re asking, “why should organizations adopt a more automated way to deliver applications? I can pretty much control the app today….”
When crafting an application or data management strategy, here’s the reality – know that automation and orchestration can alleviate many daunting management tasks. Furthermore, these technologies can create a much more agile and responsive business. This helps not only with IT tasks but entire go-to-market strategies.
- Automation directly simplifies resource provisioning and application deployment. The ever-increasing number of applications and data points absolutely have impacts on self-service provisioning and automation requirements. For example, DevOps teams rely heavily on automation and orchestration solutions to support continuous delivery and updates of modern applications. Furthermore, automated resource provisioning allows you to control valuable infrastructure resources and how they’re being distributed. To help entire DevOps teams better support the complete life cycle of their requirements from a common platform and workflow model, orchestration and provisioning tools converge to impact the way we control and deliver applications.
- Infrastructure automation integrates with overall management. Managing growing environments can quickly become a complex and fragmented process. With complexity and fragmentation, you could seriously impact the way a business competes in the market. This is why we see continued growth in demand for robust hybrid cloud and automation solutions that allow for consistent provisioning, migration, and support for advanced cloud services. Furthermore, these requirements span across on-premise and hosted private clouds as well as public cloud resources.
- New digital tools integrate with data center, cloud, virtualization, and application delivery technologies. Even if you’re a small organization, I do not doubt that you’re already working with a dozen applications, maybe even more. If you’re in the mid-market or enterprise space, your apps could number in the hundreds, if not even in the thousands. This is why it’s critical to look at new tools around automation and orchestration, which help wrap robust controls around application and data management environments. Furthermore, these systems help you with the deployment and delivery of these critical apps. For example, you can create work templates to ensure that your infrastructure keeps pace with application requirements. Or, you can orchestrate specific application tasks to remove time-consuming manual tasks. Then you can integrate your entire environment with various cloud services to truly enable business and data center agility. Remember, automation tools are also bridges into a variety of cloud services.
If you’re working with legacy applications, it’s time to take a step back and understand where these new types of tools can really make an impact on your infrastructure. By getting rid of manual processes, you help enable operational efficiencies. New data, data center, and application management tools directly integrate with automation systems to help manage everything from apps to users and their data. This management level allows managers and administrators to take a much more proactive approach to control their environments.