IT as-a-Service lets you focus on business outcomes rather than managing infrastructure
Now, more than ever before, CIOs and their senior business peers are focused on one thing when it comes to technology: how they can use systems and services to meet critical but fast-changing business needs.
The very best tech leaders – who only constitute about 10% of the current global CIO population – concentrate on using technology to improve the business. Research suggests more than half of these tech vanguards (52%) center their transformation efforts around implementing new business models.
This desire for responsive and business-focused IT has increased rapidly during the past 12 months in response to the challenging socio-economic environment. From establishing online collaboration platforms to delivering new online channels to market, CIOs and their IT departments have pivoted quickly to deliver digitally-enabled business outcomes.
CIOs' priority now will be to concentrate on how technology can enable the business to meet new objectives. They'll have to think about how digital and data can allow their organizations to overcome key business challenges, whether that's new working conditions, fresh customer demands or disrupted business models.
The key to delivering these outcomes will be establishing a solid technology infrastructure, along with innovative applications, customer experiences and emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, Internet of Things and augmented reality.
Line-of-business managers need to know that a sudden change in plans won't mean huge infrastructure concerns. CIOs, meanwhile, must be sure that they have an easy-to-manage infrastructure that will allow the IT team to innovate on behalf of their customers.
That's where Dell Technologies APEX comes in. An end-to-end infrastructure portfolio that's delivered as-a-service, APEX can enable your business to radically simplify the consumption and management of technology so that the IT team focuses on what it does best: delivering innovative solutions to ever-changing business objectives.
Infrastructure simplicity
Knowing where data is, and being able to synchronize it so that the data exists in the right place, is critical. APEX gives your business the flexibility to move data and strategically place workloads across your hybrid IT infrastructure. So whether you're isolating intensive workloads in production or looking to push data to where it's actually being analysed and processed, APEX gives your business the operational flexibility it requires.
While the need to deliver innovative technology is a business imperative, many organizations still remain challenged by the complexity of managing and maintaining their IT infrastructure. Analyst Gartner says organizations must do more to modernize their core infrastructures to minimize legacy drag, maximize efficiency and ensure resiliency.
For IT leaders who are yet to make that jump, infrastructure complexity is a big problem. It prevents tech departments from delivering value to customers. In an increasingly competitive world, where businesses in all sectors must respond swiftly to new customer demands, a lack of infrastructure simplicity could be a big barrier to future growth.
APEX can help your IT team circumnavigate this obstacle. APEX provides infrastructure delivered as-a-service that is operated by your IT department but maintained by Dell Technologies. With APEX Custom Solutions, your company can create its own on-demand environment and services that it customizes to fit its business requirements.
Infrastructure can be placed right where the data is processed and analyzed – a data center, edge location or colocation facility. What's more, your critical and performance-intensive applications are isolated, so they can run at high speed with low latency and reduced risk.
Dell owns, deploys, and manages your infrastructure, freeing up your IT team to focus on high-value business priorities, whether that's a retail CIO who wants to concentrate on customer experiences, an airline that wants to deal with passenger services, or a healthcare organization that wants to give all its attention to its patients.
Forrester research suggests Dell Technologies Cloud Services can cut the amount of time spent on configuring and maintaining IT by as much as 19%. These infrastructure management benefits mean that APEX customers receive payback in less than six months. In fact, the average incremental return in investment over three years is as high as 171%.
Rapid adoption
Recognizing that your tech teams needs to be able to change direction to meet fast-evolving business demands is simply the starting point. To deliver value rapidly, IT organizations need to order, deploy and install IT infrastructure quickly and easily.
Infrastructure-as-a-service provides the platform for your business to consume new technology on-demand. Analyst IDC predicts more than 75% of infrastructure and applications and more than half of data center infrastructure will be consumed as-a-service by 2024.
To ensure your infrastructure is delivering the value your business requires, APEX includes the cloud-based APEX Console, so you can subscribe to and configure the services that suit your business best.
Additionally, Dell Technologies engineers install, configure and provision Dell-owned hardware, upgrades, and expansions on-premises. That means regardless of location, you can adopt infrastructure when you need it most, allowing you to get started on projects faster.
IDC research show that APEX Flex on Demand allows customers to deploy storage 92% faster than before the service was introduced. Take Jordan Reinhardt, director of information services at healthcare specialist RelateCare: "We were onboarding customers in three to four weeks. But we've brought that down to a couple of days."
Increased security
Reducing security risks is quite simply a non-negotiable. With the ever-increasing threat of ransomware attacks and data breaches, analyst Canalys reports that cybersecurity investment is set to grow 10% in 2021.
However, ensuring your organization's data is safe and secure is no straightforward task. Just 29% of IT security chiefs believe they're well positioned to deal with security risks, according to consultant KPMG and recruiter Harvey Nash. No business should have to make the difficult trade-off between the simplicity they want and the security and data locality they require.
APEX bridges this divide, allowing organizations to take control of their operations, restricting unknown third-parties while allowing employees anytime/anywhere access. The result? CIOs and their businesses can isolate critical applications and assure optimal performance.
What's more, because APEX is deployed on-premises and not in shared public cloud environments, IT teams can extend their own cybersecurity and threat-detection systems. That approach makes it much easier to satisfy compliance and regulatory requirements, which Gartner says is one of the biggest concerns for board-level directors.
Conclusion: Deliver business value from technology now