Today's business strategies often involve a digital delivery of services of any kind. This implies that the requirements a modern organization has towards their internal IT have changed drastically. Unfortunately, the business owners and the IT department tend to have communication issues in some organizations. Sometimes they even operate completely disconnected from each other, as if each of them were their own small company within the organization.
Nevertheless, a lot of data center automation projects are driven by enhanced business requirements. In some of these cases, the IT department has not been made aware of what these business requirements look like, or even what the actual business challenges are. Sometimes IT just gets as little information as: We are doing cloud now.
It's a dangerous simplification, since the use case is key when it comes to designing and identifying the right solution to the organization's challenges. It is important to get the requirements from the IT delivery side as well as the business requirements and expectations.
Here is a simple example how a use case might be identified and mapped to technical implementation.
John works as a business owner in an insurance company. He recognizes that their biggest competitor in the market started to offer a mobile application to their clients. The app is simple and allows to do online contract management and tells the clients which products they have enrolled as well as rich information about contract timelines and possible consolidation options.
He asks his manager to start a project to also deliver such an application to their customers. Since it is only a simple smartphone application, he expects that its development might take a couple of weeks and then they can start a beta phase. To be competitive he estimates that they should have something usable for their customers within a maximum of 5 months. Based on these facts, he got approval from his manager to request such a product from the internal IT.
Tom is the data center manager of this insurance company. He got informed that the business wants to have a smartphone application to do all kinds of things for the new and existing customers. He is responsible for creating a project and bring all necessary people on board to support this project and finally deliver the service to the business. The programming of the app will be done by an external consulting company.
Tom discusses a couple of questions regarding this request with his team:
- How many users do we need to serve?
- How much time do we need to create this environment?
- What is the expected level of availability?
- How much compute power/disk space might be required?
After a round of brainstorming and intense discussion, the team still is quite unsure how to answer these questions. For every question, there are a couple of variables the team cannot predict.
Will only a few of their thousands of users adapt to the app, what if they undersize the middleware environment?
What if the user adoption rises within a couple of days, what if it lowers and the environment is overpowered and therefore the cost is too high?
Tom and his team identified that they need a dynamic solution to be able to serve the business request. He creates a mapping to match possible technical capabilities to the use case. After this mapping was completed, he is using it to discuss with his CIO if and how it can be implemented.
|
Business challenge |
Question |
IT capability |
|
Easy to use app to win new customers/keep existing |
How many users do we need to the server? |
Dynamic scale of an environment based on actual performance demand. |
|
How much time do we need to create this environment? |
To fulfill the expectations the environment needs to be flexible. Start small – scale big. | |
|
What is the expected level of availability? |
Analytics and monitoring over all layers. Including possible self-healing approach. | |
|
How much compute power/disk space might be required? |
Create compute nodes based on actual performance requirements on demand. Introduce a capacity on demand model for required resources. |
Given this table, Tom revealed that with their current data center structure it is quite difficult to deliver what the business is asking for. Also, he got a couple of requirements from other departments, which are going in a similar direction.
Based on these mappings, he identified that they need to change their way of deploying services and applications. They will need to use a fair amount of automation. Also, they have to span these functionalities across each data center department as a holistic approach, as shown in the following diagram:
In this example, Tom actually identified a very strong use case for SDDC in his company. Based on the actual business requirements of a simple application, the whole IT delivery of this company needs to adopt. While this may sound like pure fiction, these are the challenges modern organizations need to face today.
Tip
It is very important to identify the required capabilities for the entire data center and not just for a single department. You will also have to serve the legacy applications and bring them onto the new model. Therefore it is important to find a solution, which is serving the new business case as well as the legacy applications either way. In the first stage of any SDDC introduction in an organization, it is the key to keeping always an eye on the big picture.