The modernization of your enterprise’s systems and processes can deliver a lot of vital benefits. For starters, it can help streamline your organization’s operations and directly contribute to revenue growth. The transition goes a long way in helping an enterprise become smarter and faster in their day-to-day operations, delivery, and decision-making. Those that fail to modernize in this day and age run the risk of quickly falling behind their competitors. And if those competitors are keeping up with the pace of modernization, the gap may become too great for your company to catch up.
What is IT Modernization?
IT Modernization involves the process of shifting away from previous hardware and software solutions, consolidating your enterprise’s workflows and systems in preference of more innovative and automated solutions.
Modernization focuses on the concept of upgrading technology. This includes adopting new processes and software to drive the improvement of the end-user experiences, increased uptime, quicker fixes, and faster response time.
It also entails embracing data center and cloud approaches that entail much of your business’ hardware and software being hosted by a third party, allowing your business to consume as little as necessary. On top of upgrading technologies, modernization also involves upgrading skill sets.
In the modern era of business, enterprises have to come up with new ways and processes that reduce the time taken to reach the market, opening up new opportunities for growth. Modernizing IT systems end-to-end enables you to achieve your goals in today’s competitive ecosystem.
IT modernization with the capabilities for secure data transformation and movement that enable integration greatly improves your company’s revenue-generating processes.
For an organization to survive in this digital era, it has to prioritize the management and optimization of its core IT systems while simultaneously innovating with new and recent technology.
Importance of IT Enterprise Modernization
The major significance of IT modernization is the role it plays in addressing many of the operational challenges faced by today’s enterprises; efficiency, security, and agility. A failure to modernize leaves you vulnerable in all the three areas.
1. Efficiency
When describing the cloud, most people commonly refer to it as cost-effective, fast, and innovative. However, when cloud applications have not been integrated into your company’s IT infrastructure, it becomes almost impossible to gain efficiency.
A decentralized IT infrastructure creates management challenges that are often difficult to overcome. A decentralized IT infrastructure poses further challenges when managing data due to the presence of data silos; when data is stored in different locations, it becomes harder for you to monitor, manage, and secure it.
2. Agility
Building an agile environment is one of the best ways of putting your enterprise ahead of the competition. How quickly and efficiently you transfer data has a significant effect on the success and the growth of your organization.
With your organization’s multiple moving parts, you need an infrastructure that is both strong and flexible as well. This makes it possible for you to adjust to the ever-changing business environment quickly.
IT Modernization Practices
Since IT modernization involves the upgrading of a company’s existing systems, it is critical to thoroughly understand the already existing system to properly and effectively implement the new one. Understanding your current systems enable you to examine your business needs and further put in place your overall vision, goals, and timeline for the modernization effort.
Understanding this makes the enterprise modernization efforts much more precise, enabling you to assign resources and time to;
- Come up with new business processes that are aligned with your company’s culture and patterns
- Consult with stakeholders, scoping the full extent of the development plan
- Test and examine multiple forms of development ensuring a successful transition
Benefits of IT Modernization
1. Better Staff Efficiencies
Without the modernization of your IT systems, you will find your staff spending more time on daily operations like the managing, supporting, and securing of the IT infrastructure. The presence of siloed systems increases the risk of challenges which will regularly need to be addressed by your staff.
Modernizing makes it possible for them to dedicate their time on more valuable projects enabling you to fully make use of your staff’s skill set more effectively.
2. Increases IT agility
As your business strategies develop, you need an infrastructure that will provide you with the necessary resources. Outdated IT tends to hold back resource delivery, which affects your application development efforts.
Today’s IT infrastructure is geared towards automation. This results in faster delivery times when enterprises are rolling out new functionality or features. Your development teams can also focus on improving the quality of innovations instead of handling infrastructure failures.
3. Increased Revenues
The main drive for IT modernization is the platform it provides that enables businesses to change their processes to allow better execution of business strategy. This goes a long way in your organization’s ability to create customer value. Better customer value leads to improved customer satisfaction, which has a bearing on the revenue your company generates.
4. Improves Security
When it comes to data management, visibility and control are vital; understanding how your company’s employees are using data and with whom it is shared within or outside your network helps you make more strategic decisions.
IT infrastructures that have not been integrated make it much more difficult and cumbersome to secure the data.
5. Minimizes operation costs
The efficiency and agility your company gains from the automation of your IT management processes make it possible for you to reduce the costs of operation since modernization lowers the occurrence of unplanned outages and the effects those outages tend to have on your team’s productivity and your enterprise’s loss of revenue.
IT modernization is helpful to drive your business’ growth and strategy throughout the various departments, freeing up IT resources, focusing them on your company’s core service or product. However, the modernization process can be complicated and entails various processes, people, and technologies.
Because of this, some companies tend to prefer to deal with the high maintenance and support costs of old systems instead of modernizing to avoid the disruption of solutions critical to the running of the business. While this disruption can be detrimental to the business’ operations, being left behind can prove a lot more fatal.
When the time is right for your enterprise’s modernization, confiding in a professional team will help you identify and understand your needs, and also simplify and accelerate the whole process. Request a demo today.
Tags: Modernization, Digitalization