EMEA Chief Technology Officer Gary Harrison explores how infrastructure service abstraction can unlock business agility, innovation and cost-efficiency.
Welcome to the abstraction of your infrastructure. It sounds complicated, but in reality it’s the simplification of infrastructure and spend and an intelligent shift away from convoluted and complex resource and infrastructure provisioning towards increased agility, provisioning capability, and more efficient resource management. Using a variety of different tools and technologies, infrastructure abstraction provides you with richer and more granular control over your resources.
It is also a growing trend thanks to its reliability and its ability to unlock innovation within the organisation. As McKinsey points out, this allows for the organisation to gain ‘greater flexibility and a powerful competitive edge’. Using software layers and infrastructure automation to abstract underlying infrastructure capability and features, you gain immediate and unparalleled freedom to explore virtual and containerised environments without risk to the business, and with increased speed and scale.
The key to unlocking abstraction lies in intelligence
Machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are some of the key technologies shaping the evolution of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) abstraction. These technologies have evolved at immense speed because they introduce immense opportunity. Companies can leap into virtualised infrastructure, platforms, and everything as a service at the click of a button, experimenting and exploring new areas of optimisation at lower price points and higher value.
Companies can leverage IaaS within their private cloud, to design features that deliver relevant business value. This also opens up space to experiment, to use automated IaaS abstraction capabilities to improve the speed of application release cycles and to introduce greater independence from infrastructure software lifecycles. You can also, using the right approaches, remove company reliance on the full stack or cross-stack software dependencies without compromising on agility. There is immense value in creating internal abstractions from within your existing platforms and capabilities to translate infrastructure into opportunity.
More than just agility at play
You can use IaaS abstraction to create an application lifecycle that’s independent from vendor-specific features, integrations and software versions. Moving away from lock-in towards agnostic approaches that are far more scalable and intuitive, particularly if using virtual machines, containers, and serverless computing. The latter three allow for companies to decouple from underlying hardware and move away from vendor limitations. You’re not trapped by features you don’t need within technology that you might need, instead you’re building an infrastructure that’s relevant to what you actually need.
With the right toolkit and partner, you can fully realise the potential of IaaS within your existing infrastructure and capabilities.
Cost-efficiency and innovation are wrapped within IaaS
Your business is going to change. You’re going to adapt to market needs, to uncertainty, to new ideas and to competitor shifts. This means you need infrastructure and technology that’s capable of keeping up with what you need right now. This is why IaaS has also evolved so rapidly – it doesn’t compromise on business growth or infrastructure capability.
You can build the right infrastructure with the technologies and solutions that are relevant to your business and you can adapt and evolve this investment on demand, so your infrastructure is aligned to your strategy.
Guided by our Digital Maturity Blueprint, Metsi builds custom IaaS solutions that are designed to help you unleash business agility and offer you granular control over cost, capability and innovation from within your company’s own platform and engineering capabilities.
Wherever you are in your XaaS journey, Metsi will take the next step toward future transformation with you. Our streamlined approach to digital maturity uses data-driven insights to drive continuous improvement, automate platform and infrastructure optimisation, and build security and compliance into the service lifecycle. Click here to find out how.
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