A Contributed Article by Atchison Frazer, Vice President, Marketing, Xangati

The demands placed on today's IT infrastructures - everything from virtualized infrastructures to virtual desktops to web applications - are clear: deliver greater value by maintaining high performance, ensure higher-quality information at lower costs and at lower risk, and reduce maintenance and outages. This all equates to reaching business agility and increased profits; pivoting with deliberate speed to take advantage of new market or product category revenue opportunities.

When investing in IT infrastructure to deliver the speed and scale required to compete in a globalized economy, enterprises have expanded their organizations from local to national to even global, and increasingly are becoming virtualized and cloud-enabled.

The concept of business agility is notionally about the timely access to real-time information, fast and reliable data that not only supports effective decision-making at the lowest cost, but also the ability to automate remedial actions for improved productivity. But where is the imperative? I maintain that businesses seeking to achieve true business agility face three challenges relating to their IT infrastructures:

Performance Optimization: Since the interdependencies between IT infrastructure components and the rendered applications have been discovered and continuously tracked, the entire infrastructure can now be optimized based on a zero-latency data stream that helps deliver higher levels of service quality in a more cost-effective fashion.

Performance Predictability: The higher levels of control over IT infrastructure elements and brokered applications enable organizations to more consistently understand and predict IT performance, end-user quality of service, and productivity. This level of value is derived primarily from greater visibility to granular data about how existing infrastructure is impacted by a new system rollout or upgrade.

Service Assurance: This encompasses the ability to offer service-level guarantees by operators (e.g., the VI admin or devops manager) that ensure high performance end-to-end across the entire globalized infrastructure, components and applications, while consistently controlling quality and productivity levels through a common aggregation point for key performance indicators of operational excellence. Utilizing this analytics framework, the IT infrastructure becomes an integral part of the entity's go-to-market strategy with actionable intelligence upon which business users can measure progress.

A framework for service assurance in a virtual infrastructure is underpinned by two principal success factors, data integrity and ROI, both of which contribute to achieving a goal of stronger competitive differentiation. These are important not only to ensure that your underlying IT infrastructure is resilient and reliable, but to vouch for your organization's digital foundation and its ability to optimize any new or accretive business imperative that shifting market and customer conditions dictate, all while maintaining robust business continuity.

About the Author

Atchison Frazer brings over 20 years of IT strategic marketing expertise to Xangati, most recently as CMO of KEMP Technologies, an emerging growth software developer competing in the enterprise Application Delivery Controller segment, and prior to that, CMO of Gnodal Ltd (now part of Cray), an innovator of High Performance Computing data-fabric technology and High Frequency Trading fintech infrastructure.

Previously, he was responsible for services strategy, global marketing and sales enablement to support Cisco's global enterprise theatre and enterprise transformation market segments, including enterprise security software, network optimization services and application visibility management solutions. Atchison also has held senior marketing and communications leadership roles with ServGate, Fortinet and HP.