Composable Architecture Q&A. Are you ready?

Q: Is it time for my company to jump on the composable architecture bandwagon?

A: Composable architectures are quickly becoming essential to the modern enterprise.

Citing a recent Forrester study: the adoption of composable infrastructure as an element of a hybrid IT strategy results in faster, more flexible, and more efficient ecosystems that enable companies to:

• better meet customer expectations,
• gain an edge over competitors, and
• increase selling opportunities (89%).

Why composable architecture?

Composable infrastructures deliver compute, storage, and network resources as services from multiple logical resource pools.

The approach treats infrastructure like applications. It enables IT to construct new systems from collections of software-defined building blocks, which are managed as code. Infrastructure automation tools provision the required infrastructure on demand.

The challenge…

The challenge with this approach is many organizations aren’t yet prepared to operate the data center automation and multiple clouds that are foundational to a composable infrastructure. They need to walk before they run. To effectively do so, enterprises should implement a data center infrastructure design and optimization strategy focused on application portfolio rationalization. By tackling the modernization task this way—from the infrastructure side—legacy data centers become private clouds, and existing legacy or packaged applications get migrated onto the highly-automated environment.

Taking this initial step towards a hybrid-cloud environment enables a rational and collaborative adoption of public cloud infrastructure services (IaaS). It can also reduce friction often caused by the need to retrain staff in public cloud operations, modern infrastructure technologies, and composable solution management tools.

Management guidance…

A recent report from IDC, about the use of multi- and hybrid cloud services, highlights related composable architecture management issues, such as:  

• The need for enterprises to become more agile in their responsiveness to customers
• Organizational requirements to optimize ROI from all investments—especially IT
• Requirements for addressing the technical complexity of adopting the cloud model
• An imperative to transform CIO and IT function into a collaboration and integration hub for all other enterprise executives and functions

IDC suggests that organizations looking to partner with services firms to effectively deploy composable services architectures should work with firms that also provide:

• Technology advisory and consulting services that help in application portfolio rationalization and modernization, robust security blueprint design, and data center infrastructure design and optimization;
• Transformational road map development support for upgrading legacy to private cloud using existing assets and replacing existing infrastructure with public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS); and
• The experience and know-how to deliver more agility and speed from IT, increasing revenue by enabling firms to build new revenue-generating products and services faster while also addressing the management complexities of deploying and managing applications across multi-cloud environments

This recommended path towards implementing a hybrid cloud environment optimizes the composable architecture strategy to build new revenue-generating products and services while simultaneously addressing key inhibitors to change.

This post is sponsored by @IBM Services.

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