Marc O'Regan, Dell Technologies Ireland

Today’s ‘do from anywhere’ world needs a more flexible approach to digital transformation

Dell Technologies Forum on 3 November to provide insights on how businesses can harness new technologies to thrive in an as-a-service economy
Pro
Marc O'Regan, Dell Technologies Ireland

13 October 2021

In association with Dell Technologies

Faced with a once-in-a-generation challenge, businesses have shown what they can achieve – sometimes in days – to transform business models and enable flexible working. By embracing new technologies at speed over the past 19 months, 68% of organisations in Ireland have shortened their target window for digital transformation.

By accelerating the pace of digital adoption to first react to change or then to seize new opportunities, Irish businesses have proven two key things. Firstly, that digital transformation is an ongoing process that requires continual commitment to keep pace with an evolving economy. Secondly, those who are thinking digital first and re-imagining how to differentiate their products and services through technology will be best prepared for a data-driven world.

Technology will fuel the ‘do from anywhere’ thinking

These important realisations, combined with increased IT investments, have created a new ‘do anything from anywhere’ mentality. Far deeper than simply sending out technology devices, this attitude combines technology and tools with culture to create new processes and programmes that accelerate connectivity and productivity.

To capitalise on this, leaders across Ireland are looking at new ways of working, bringing together diverse talent with unique skill sets, and embedding a new test and learn approach so they can fail fast, learn, adjust, and keep going.

This is key for digital transformation as real improvements come when business process owners and their technical teams come together to innovate and focus on the ‘why’ of transformation rather than the ‘how’.

Focus on technology that delivers business outcomes

By aligning decision-making to business outcomes rather than technology issues, CIOs can build a strong technology foundation and establish common processes and tools. This will speed up digital transformation, create efficiencies, and drive compliance as they explore how things like 5G, AI, automation and functions help accelerate the extraction of real-time insights from data at the edge, to can keep them relevant and to fuel growth.

From a technology perspective, capitalising on these types of opportunities in the past may have meant complex, rigid, and siloed projects with separate teams. Each project would have different infrastructure needs, diverting the CIOs attention from growth to operations.

Today, however, CIOs are increasingly looking at as-a-service solutions to reduce the time and complexity of acquiring, managing, maintaining and servicing physical IT infrastructures. With just a few clicks, IT can browse a marketplace of services, answer a few questions and subscribe to a new service solution.

Embracing as-a-service solutions will become more important as businesses look to harness the power of data at the Edge. Of the 175ZB of new data that will be created by 2025, 75% will be created and processed outside the traditional data centre or cloud – it will be found at the Edge.

Demand is growing for this approach with industry analyst research like ESG’s 2021 Technology Spending Intentions survey suggesting that 53% of current Infrastructure-as-a-Service users prefer a consumption-based model for data centre infrastructures. Taking an as-a-Service approach gives businesses a number of advantages:
• The flexibility to choose technology services that work best for them and only pay for what they need when they need it.
• A consistent experience across their entire infrastructure which scales up or down as capacity needs change. It applies to expected and unexpected events alike, ranging from predictable busy periods to rapidly scaling to seize a new market opportunity, or, as we’ve already seen, moving a workforce remote over a weekend like many had to do in March of 2020.
• Control and compliance. The ability to provide and consume consistent digital services on their terms and in a policy driven and governed way.

With the flexibility to scale and manage modern infrastructure in this way, they can reduce risk and satisfy compliance by leveraging their own physical security, cybersecurity, and threat detection solutions to protect their intellectual property, customer and employee data.

Putting the as-a-service economy under the spotlight

Providing this outcome-based strong foundation has been the driving force behind the development of Dell Technologies APEX portfolio of as-a-service offerings which was unveiled in May of this year. It will help simplify digital transformation by increasing IT simplicity, agility, and control, via a cloud-based service model.

APEX Data Storage Services has developed to offer enterprise storage when and where organisations need it while APEX Cloud Services will enable companies to easily choose hybrid or private cloud resources designed to meet the needs of critical workloads such as AI and virtual desktop infrastructure. First launched in the US, APEX is Dell Technologies premier as-a-service offering which will be expanded into other markets.

With today’s IT leaders increasingly turning to as-a-service, and IDC predicting that by 2024, half of data centre infrastructure will be consumed as-a-service, APEX gives organizations the flexibility to choose technology services that best meet their needs.

Helping Irish organisations to thrive in an as-a-service economy will be one of the main aims of the Dell Technologies Forum which takes place virtually on 3 November. Business and IT leaders will gain important insights into new ways of driving innovation and using new technology to drive business success in a ‘do from anywhere’ world.

By taking the insights and lessons learnt from the Dell Technologies Forum, organisations within the public and private sectors can seize opportunities being unlocked by data and be ready, no matter what comes their way.

The Dell Technologies Forum is an annual event run in partnership with Intel and Microsoft. Register for your place for this free virtual event here and join the #DellTechForum conversation.


Back to Top ↑

TechCentral.ie