Overcoming 3 Major Obstacles to Modernizing Infrastructure

Whatever the industry, companies often attribute their success to investments in cutting-edge infrastructure and the innovation that results. However, obstacles inevitably hinder their progress at every turn.

Challenges like ever-increasing process complexities, outdated systems and skill shortages make it hard to realize modern infrastructure’s full potential. For example, a global doughnut chain with more than 1,600 locations faced needing to modernize legacy applications and migrate to the cloud. With Insight’s help, they’re tackling those issues, while also bringing their orders app into the future. That includes replatforming it, automating processes and ultimately creating a frictionless guest experience, with a projected 40% increase in usability.

Here are the key issues other Insight clients regularly contend with and how we advise them in response:

1. Technical debt

As infrastructure continue to evolve, technical debt builds up, leading to higher maintenance costs, slowed processes and diminished performance. This causes significant innovation obstacles. Aging systems and architectures also become more vulnerable to security threats from malicious actors.

While enterprises can’t completely eliminate technical debt, they can mitigate its impact through strategic planning and management. That involves identifying areas where technical debt exists, establishing priorities for addressing it and more informed, subsequent decision-making. By proactively managing the debt, businesses can prevent it from impeding crucial advancements by the organization.

There are four guiding principles to successfully address technical debt:

• Avoid compartmentalizing. A common pitfall sees organizations only upgrade small components of a solution without addressing the underlying technical debt. By not tackling the entire solution, the debt merely shifts to another area.
• Stay organized. Each purchase for your IT environment is a commitment to use that technology. Maintain a comprehensive inventory of your systems and track their lifecycle stages. Consider this inventory a roadmap to managing technical debt. Staying aware of current systems, identifying immediate update needs and planning for future upgrades help to proactively prevent technical-debt-related problems.
• Work with experts. Managing technical debt takes expertise and experience. Some organizations lack the internal capabilities to address it effectively. Working with a knowledgeable partner like Insight to mitigate tech debt fills resource gaps and enables companies to redirect their focus toward their digital transformation efforts.
• Speed up your growth by first slowing down. Renewals, mergers and acquisitions, and divestiture activities are landmark events that drive businesses toward modernizing. Instead of rushing through decisions, carefully evaluate and implement cost-effective solutions to prevent the future accumulation of additional technical debt.

2. The IT resource gap

Making headway on modernization efforts means striking a balance between maintaining existing infrastructure and driving innovation. The demands of overseeing complex systems that require 24/7 monitoring leave organizations with limited time, though. Operations also take up a huge chunk of IT’s bandwidth, restricting resources for strategic initiatives. Consumption-based models make a big difference for the better, based on our survey, The Path to Digital Transformation: Where IT Leaders Stand in 2024. For example, the results, which Insight compiled in partnership with Foundry, an IDG company, say 96% of IT decision-makers use one or more as-a-service delivery models. More than 80% use more than three.

Another Insight client, a healthcare provider, felt a deep financial burden dealing with traditional capital-expenditure models. Insight recommended cloud-like as-a-service consumption to improve their scalability through on-demand resource allocation. After transitioning to an operating-expenditure model, they are looking at an estimated 35% reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) over five years.

Ultimately, obsolete IT infrastructure models limit scalability and foster inflexible costs and vendor lock-in, impeding a company’s digital transformation. Embracing Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) solutions empowers organizations to pay only for the services they need. The improved resource allocation can only help their modernization efforts.

3. AI infrastructure challenges

AI helps organizations drive modernization at unprecedented speeds. Maximizing the ROI of AI initiatives calls for AI-ready networking, storage and compute infrastructure. However, our clients frequently face challenges supporting AI solutions with the right infrastructure. Implementing that infrastructure is another challenge altogether.

Whether they’re starting from scratch or dealing with existing IT infrastructure, here’s what Insight generally advises:

• Look at the big picture and business objective, which should inform interim decision-making.
• Exercise patience and adaptability when extracting full value from your data estate. It takes time.
• Retire, replace or refactor components under the right circumstances (i.e., if they don’t provide value or the tech debt outweighs that value).
• Take a slow and steady approach with iterative releases to move forward, as cutting corners only leads to more tech debt.

How much potential does your organization have?

At a crossroads, you may be considering the right strategy to modernize your infrastructure. The general path forward is fairly clear though, because so are the benefits: cost optimization, improved performance, stronger security posture, less technical debt and more bandwidth to innovate further, faster.

For more information on how to modernize your infrastructure, visit insight.com or call 1.800.INSIGHT.