Why Infrastructure Matters

by

Adrian Kingsford, CTO, Viadex

Infrastructure’s dead, right?
Wrong! Apps have to run on something!

As new recruits are joining the marketplace, many of which aspiring to be the next best coder, app developer or data scientist, there may soon be a shortage of skilled infrastructure people, i.e. those with the knowledge of how hardware works, along with software-defined infrastructures, and how to design, build, run and optimise it all for the benefit of the software stack above.

On-premises is not dead either, because public cloud services are not always the answer to everyone’s needs. So, a hybrid platform is what most people talk about these days – that being a mixture of things that get the job done – and I expect that’s where the vast majority of businesses will end up, so by its very nature that means you need to know how to handle the many diverse infrastructure platforms currently available and continually emerging.

Modern-day infrastructures need to be built, or transformed, to be agile and cloud-like, and hyper-convergence is certainly a great platform choice for making that easier for many of us, as its software definition lends itself nicely to providing a model for both on-premises infrastructure (hardware and software), and software-defined infrastructures in the clouds.

To get to a cloud-like experience, e.g. where things are spun up/down with ease and stuff is consumed as-a-service, there is a lot of learning, experimenting, and confidence building for infrastructure teams to do, to get the user experience with the same look/feel and ways of working across all platforms.

Sometimes using third parties to help that transformation is more cost effective, more timely, and can bring areas of expertise that are lacking internally or would take too long to learn. As well as actually doing the work, they can also teach you how to do things the best way, explain the reasons why, and enable you to manage the infrastructure most efficiently and effectively.

Through our Transformation Methodology we support you by providing insights into technology trends, demonstrating a vision of what the future mode of operation could look like, assessing existing environments to understand the current mode of operation, creating commercial and technical solution designs, transforming the technology environments, and providing ongoing service excellence with life-cycle services through monitoring, management and optimisation of infrastructure platforms, whether hardware defined, software defined, in your own data centres or someone else’s.

If you’d like to get in touch about a project, or just want to ask for some advice, we’re always happy to talk. Email us at info@viadex.com