The Summer of Webinars ‘Virtual Meetup’ series continued its ground-breaking approach to thought leadership and engagement on May 28th with a webinar launching a new research report (underwritten by AMD), Scaling Inside the Envelope. The report and webinar focused on how IT strategists can scale delivery capacity to meet hugely-increased demand in times where budgets and data centre facility access are limited.
The 23-page report, which is available to Summer of Webinar subscribers and other interested IT professionals today, is designed to help IT strategists to build a time and cost-effective path towards deployment of resources needed to support demand for IT-dependent services. It begins with a review of pros and cons associated with five different scale-up options: upgrading installed IT equipment, expanding current data centre facilities, building new company-owned data centres, expanding into colo facilities and expanding into public cloud. The analysis considered seven factors – internal facility ownership/management of facilities and/or of IT equipment, incremental facility and IT equipment investment requirements, incremental opex needs, software refactoring requirements and security – identifying how and where these were most likely to have an impact on different scale-up options.
The second section of the report focuses on “Business drivers: Scaling up IT service.” This discussion is divided into two major sections: an analysis of 25 business drivers that align with immediate business objectives, longer-term aspirational goals, digital transformation and IT-specific requirements, followed by an examination of 14 business benefits that are associated with scaling up capacity inside the envelope. These business benefits are grouped into four broad categories – better performance, better return on assets, better management control and improved continuity and responsiveness – that will help readers to connect scale-up investments to executive-level concerns.
Click here to request a copy of the Scaling Inside the Envelope report
The core of the report considers scale-up best practices. These, too, are assigned to one of four groups: addressing increased demand for delivery capacity, providing security across the IT stack, improving manageability and limiting sprawl, and implementing an orderly approach to infrastructure modernization. Here, the insight and experience of the 13 contributors to the report delivers guidance that organizations of all types can use to improve time-to-benefit and value received from scale-up activities. A closing section, “key scale-up management metrics,” considers the most important measures that can and should be included in management dashboards delivered to senior executives, IT management and IT practitioners.
Webinar provides an interactive perspective on scale-up options
The ‘Virtual Meetup’ supporting the report launch, delivered on May 28th, gave Summer of Webinars subscribers an opportunity to interact with the report content and creators. The session opened with a Spotlight Presentation from AMD’s Greg Gibby which focused on data centre challenges – disrupted customers and markets, dramatically shifting threat paradigms, expanding technology options and aging infrastructure – faced by today’s IT strategists. The panel discussion that followed included perspectives from three key data centre user communities, with Craig McLellan of service provider ThinkOn, Wensi Lu of State Street Bank and Sham Satrohan of the Ontario Government Ministry of Government and Consumer Services – all, like AMD’s Gibby, contributors to the report – discussing options, investment drivers and best practices associated with IT capacity scale-up.
Options and next steps
Scaling Inside the Envelope – along with When Your Hybrid Cloud Network is Secondary to Your Cloud-First Strategy and In-Band vs. Out-of-Band Data Centre Monitoring and Management, the first two reports in the series – are available now to all Summer of Webinar subscribers, as are video replays of the May 28th Scaling Inside the Envelope Virtual Meetup, and the April 28th (“Remote Control: Connecting Automation and SDDC”) and May 12th (When Your Hybrid Cloud Network is Secondary to Your Cloud-First Strategy) sessions.
The next webinar in the series is scheduled for the first full week of July, and will focus on sustainability. InsightaaS principals Mary Allen and Michael O’Neil are former Sustainable IT columnists with Bloomberg BNA, and report sponsor OVH is an innovator in data centre sustainability practices. The event will provide a tremendous close to the Summer of Webinars series – and will position the DC Foresight community for further success as it continues Virtual Meetups in the fall, leading to the two-day virtual/hybrid version of GCDCS20, Canada’s leading data centre event. f you’d like to be part of the July discussion, and stay updated on future DC Foresight activities (including GCDCS20), here’s a page that describes the entire series, and which includes a ‘master registration’ link.
InsightaaS, Summer of Webinars sponsors Intel, Technology Integration Group, AMD and OVH thank you for your support in this difficult time. We look forward to seeing you in the fall, and at GCDCS20 on December 8th and 9th – and offer our best wishes to each of you for a safe and healthy summer!
