Innovate To Deliver Your 2025 Vision

December 4, 2024 Richard Dolewski

IT innovation refers to the process of introducing continuous improvement by leveraging technology, services, and solutions to empower IT service delivery. Innovation involves strategically implementing holistic solutions to enhance current and future efficiency across the organization. With fast-paced technological advances (AI, Cloud, Security, Resiliency) disrupting all industries, these future outcome-based technologies create hesitation and pause to what’s achievable, required now, and relevant to your company’s strategic plans.

Innovation must bring changes to the core delivery of IT-related services that drive increased efficiency thus making IT services delivery less costly, less time-consuming to implement, automated to improve services levels, and further protect our data. The result is a more reliable, secure IT infrastructure that enhances scalability, performance, sustainability, data protection, and cost management alongside faster digital adoption and time to market.

On the other hand, innovation should not be a catchall buzzword for simply refreshing your on-premises data center with the latest shiny technology stack or making change for change’s sake. Press “The Easy Button” – Refresh the current lease and keep costs aligned to the current OPEX, but this change delivers minimal business advancement. Current and new, yes, but no added business value.

Continuous Improvement And Innovation Can Be Simplified Into Two Buckets.

In one bucket are innovations that simply extend current IBM i and AIX infrastructure and underlying capabilities by improving existing operations with purpose – the basic building blocks addressing short to medium-term needs. This aligns with continuous improvement objectives by assessing the current deployments by reviewing all industry standards, IBM best practices, and IT disciplines.

The second bucket is innovations that generate a future-proof IT roadmap with an adaptation of a proven reference architecture to move enterprise legacy workloads to the Cloud and define the outcomes behind Hybrid and multi-cloud adoption strategy in your organization. Application modernization is essential for IBM shops, which means optimizing business operating models with a hybrid cloud and AI to drive cost efficiency, increase productivity, and create future opportunities for innovation.

Innovation Bucket – Cloud Roadmap

Hybrid Cloud

The days of going “all-in” on any single cloud strategy are over. While the Cloud offers incredible agility and scale, many organizations face increasing costs and performance limitations with a lack of scalability, comprehensive data protection, and data security risks. The stakes are even higher when legacy systems are involved.

You must consider that no two workloads are alike. Public Cloud is ideal for many workloads but recognizes that specific applications (Homegrown or Commercial ERP) perform best in Private Cloud or on-premises infrastructure. Re-platforming may make sense when making moderate changes so it can work well in the Private Cloud without rewriting its core architecture. Re-platforming can improve performance, scalability, security, and cost efficiency. It’s often considered the best choice because it balances added functionality with a less complex migration extending to public Cloud-facing applications. Application modernization remains a top strategic initiative. Hybrid cloud solutions accelerate data center complacency by refactoring the core IBM systems, connecting the workload immediately to multiple clouds or Hybrid. Modernization and innovation are synonymous.

Modernization for IT can lead to many business innovation opportunities:

Medium and Long-Term Data Center Strategy Roadmap

- Reference Architecture to include Modernization of infrastructure and operations.

- - Right-sized, virtualized IBM Power compute adjacent to the Public Cloud. Deciding on a path (modernize and then move or move first and modernize later).

- Determine what apps and data make business and technology sense in the Cloud.

- - Benefits for Private or Hybrid environment and risks

- Capacity Modeling sizing application workloads for IBM Power.

- - Scale to Business Needs

Multi-Cloud

Next, let’s take a brief look at a multi-cloud strategy. This includes using multiple private and public cloud providers to run IT workloads. This may involve a combination of private on-premises workloads and other public cloud providers. Common questions to determine if a multi-cloud strategy might be a fit for you include:

Mitigate capacity risk by spreading workloads across multiple clouds.
Benefit from moving workloads based on geographical proximity and latency.
Leverage multi-cloud infrastructure to build High Availability and disaster recovery capabilities. While availability zones and regions provide levels of redundancy, running applications or replicating data across multiple cloud providers offers the next level of redundancy.

Consider using generative AI with new code generation to enable your hybrid cloud developers to migrate and modernize legacy application codes at scale to the new target platforms with code consistency and speed for accelerating modernization. IBM object-oriented architecture with built-in security is highly optimized with an integrated database (DB2) that allows access to modern programming languages and mobile on the IBM platform.

Innovation Bucket – Security Posture

Do you currently have a comprehensive security and compliance solution to ensure the highest standards of data protection and uninterrupted access to your data? Ransomware is here, and it’s a real threat to everyone. Your mission-critical applications and data are the lifeblood of your business, and your customers are trusting you to keep their information secure.

What you need to consider is a review of your current security posture, so you have situational awareness of your current deployed security baseline. IBM i software, coupled with 3rd party software providers like Kisco, have designed software to keep you secure. Your IBM Power systems are only as secure as the setup that may have made sense years ago but not today. Perform a baseline assessment of all your System-wide security configurations, user-level settings, exit points, and audit journaling. Secondly, test and remediate your security policies to validate the baseline and create a security incident policy roadmap. Lastly, perform an external IBM i penetration test to understand open ports and unsecured services beyond access to the actual data itself, providing an actionable list of ranked, exploitable issues and objective proof of any vulnerabilities.

Visibility to your IBM Power system must include continuous monitoring and threat prevention to give you the required visibility into your operation 7/24. If you’re not staffed for this level of support, consider adopting the services of a trained US-based Network Operations Center (NOC) that can be leveraged with their highly specialized toolsets for combined best-in-class security tooling, automation, and specialized compliance services to ensure your cloud environments are always secure.

IBM Authority collection is a capability that is provided as part of the base operating system. At a high level, authority collection captures data that is associated with the runtime authority checking that is built into the IBM i system. This data is logged into a repository provided by the system, and interfaces are available to display and analyze the data. By using the authority collection capability, you avoid excess authority, and the overall security of the objects used by an application is improved.

Innovation Bucket – IT Resilience

Systems of record that previously functioned in the background are expanding today to include real-time connections with endless application touchpoints spanning numerous clouds. In our “always-connected” world, the flow of information and commerce means around-the-clock access to “data” because our business never sleeps. Business systems availability means IT must deliver commercial-ready ERP applications, transactional throughput, analytics, and a variety of secured mobile and social capabilities.

IT resilience today requires more than just nightly backups and DR. There is a significant business need for flexible and cost-effective technology foundation deployed Continuous Data Protection (CDP), SAN Tooling with Global Mirror and PowerHA, and DB2 Mirror, bundled with Managed Disaster Recovery Services to deliver the best resiliency available. Instead of restoring from last night’s backup, you can recover to the journal commitment boundary minutes before a bad DB update or failover to your Active-DB on another host IBM Power system. CDP utilizes journaling technology to keep track of all transactions, while DB2 Mirror uses remote direct memory access (RDMA) across two nodes paired together to create a synchronous environment. With Db2 Mirror, Automated clones, and Global Mirror IASP = Systems Availability is keeping production environments online during planned maintenance, and there is a near zero data loss as any DB and System updates would automatically be mirrored to another server.

The use of these technologies provides multiple benefits over traditional data protection technologies. These are all powerful tools for developing IT resilience by combining them with orchestration capabilities from Managed Services, thus allowing numerous recovery points. RTO and RPO today are measured in minutes and hours rather than days – IT must align their systems availability and data protection schemes operationally (with proven Runbooks) and strategically with their Business goals for Business Continuity, High Availability, and Disaster Recovery. BC = HA + DR

Lastly, by implementing Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs), you can group applications to be protected and recovered together. This provides complete application consistency, regardless of the physical location of the servers and storage. Protecting workloads with VPGs allows you to use an application-level granularity as opposed to a LUN-level granularity. Availability drives everything you do—from the business processes that drive revenue to the applications that drive productivity and the data that drives business decisions.

Benefits in the Digital World

Eliminates most Planned and Unplanned outages
Granular recovery of files/tables
Complete systems and DB failover capabilities
Resiliency Strategy includes Application tiers, On-premises and Hybrid Cloud
Orchestrated testing for non-disruptive capabilities

The First 90 In 2025

Your business climate requires a new level of agility and scale to manage resilient, secure IT deployments with a continuous improvement culture. Innovation transforms a business by enabling technology modernization with step-by-step process refinement and continuous improvement, allowing IT to adapt seamlessly alongside new technological advancements and evolving business demands. Rather than a one-time overhaul and a new BIG project every 2 years, the innovation process involves constant integration toward desired business outcomes. Create a minimum viable innovation system – the most basic building blocks are defined so IT can separate your critical system needs to drive immediate, continuous improvement and explore the longer-term strategic milestones that align with what your business needs. We must innovate and deliver new capabilities in order to be relevant in the new world of Business. The need to change is consistent, time to market is relevant, and change will bring a leading advantage.

Moving applications to the cloud is one of the most important digital transformation activities.

Richard Dolewski is vice president of hybrid cloud solutions at Connectria.

This content is sponsored by Connectria.

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