The second half of the decade is around the corner. It’s that time of the year to reflect, refresh and even resolve. Weight loss and work out never goes out of fashion but I thought I would put myself in the shoes of IT leadership. There is so much pressure on IT to embrace every new paradigm or fad that sometimes it can be hard to stay focused on fundamentals. These fundamentals don’t change no matter where technology goes. Here is my take on some resolutions for 2016.
Look for opportunities to disrupt yourself
Technology continues to make the competitive arena a level playing field. It is a good time to envision what your business can do with the information you have in terms of acquiring, serving and retaining your customers and employees. Think about the infrastructure that you need for rearchitecting your IT to achieve those goals. What areas need retooling? Where is the biggest bang for the buck?
Spend less time firefighting
In an increasingly digital world the value of information continues to grow and so does the cost of firefighting after an IT infrastructure disaster (caused by man, machine or nature) to minimize data loss and downtime. With the right protection and availability strategy we have heard many customer stories where the business was delighted at the level of availability IT was able to provide in the face of severe natural disasters.
Spend more weekends with family
It drives me crazy that something like replacing a storage array can take up to 9 months. Storage tech refresh is really the poster child of automation starved IT infrastructure where countless weekends are spent on copying over data and remediating hosts. You can stop this forever with a data/workload mobility strategy that can bring in a lot more agility to your operations. And the results are close to heart for everybody, spending more time with family!
By now a lot of 2016’s work may already be cut out for you. Take a moment and see how much of it is helping your business be more competitive, versus resource intensive maintenance that could be avoided altogether by adopting the above New Year’s resolutions.