“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” – A well-known saying that could be very costly advice.
I recently had some plumbing work needed at home. While I had the plumber here I had him service my boiler. He ran some tests and found it had an efficiency rating of 63%. Which for its age, is not bad at all. Only a few percentage points lower than what it would have had when it was brand new. I thought it might be showing its age a bit in terms of dust and rust but still working away pretty well. It’s a critical part of the infrastructure of my house. At the back of my mind was the old saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. That was until my plumber told me that the newest version of my boiler scores upwards of 97% efficiency. That’s over 50% better than my current boiler!
At the time I was buying oil three times a year. I didn’t need to be a math genius to figure out that if I upgraded to a new boiler, I’ll be buying one less tank of oil a year. Not only is that good for the environment, but at close to €1000 a fill, that’s very good news for my pocket too. So good in fact, that the cost of the new boiler would be paid back in less than two years. I had the new boiler installed last summer and it scored 98% efficiency on commissioning.
Now in a completely different world, the world of IT. I recently came across a statistic from a study conducted by Deloitte. They found that just one-tenth of a second improvement in website/application speed can lead to 10% higher sales! Only 0.1 of a second! When looking for such small margins for such a major impact, clearly any efficiency that can be found should be looked at with urgency and seriousness.
In the IT industry, the Network is similar to the heating and cooling in your home. In fact, a colleague of mine used to say “Networking is like oxygen, once it’s gone, you’re gone”. With mindsets like this, it breeds a fear of change. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”! Don’t touch the core infrastructure! Any change needs to have very careful planning, a detailed rollback plan, and a huge amount of notification and communication. But what if there was a way to separate the control of the connections of critical applications from the underlying network infrastructure? What if the applications that are core to your business could automatically route around any such impact or outage?
Let’s also look at the operational inefficiencies of the IT Operations teams in a modern enterprise. How do their DevOps and CloudOps teams work together? Or more accurately put, don’t work together. It can take weeks and sometimes months for them to deploy new applications with the connectivity required. This is even further exasperated when it’s a cloud deployment. In many companies, they simply take the view that it may take a long time, but they are such clever and skilled teams that they will figure out a way to make it work no matter how complex it might be. It’s just the way things are done. It’s as if they are saying “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. There’s a definite fear of change, “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t..” You can pick your adage to suit. There’s a reluctance to address something that’s seen as “working”. But what if there was a way to improve that collaboration to such an extent that those weeks and months could be reduced to just minutes?
If we can change that from say four weeks to 30 minutes, we are looking at a 144000% efficiency improvement. In a world where just 0.1 of a second can make such an impact. What would such an improvement do for your organisation?
Now what if I were to tell you of a new solution from IBM where you could transform how your DevOps and CloudOps teams collaborate together? Where potentially, your application traffic could be extracted from changes and impacts in the underlay network?
With IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh, IT Operations teams can start changing how fast they get new applications online and working, from weeks and months, down to minutes. Then you’d take note right?
In a complex hybrid cloud world where just 0.1 of a second improvement in a website/application speed can result in 10% increase in sales, how valuable is it to get your new application or service up and running potentially months ahead of what it normally takes?
If you want to know more about saving time with the auto-discovery of cloud infrastructure, easily creating application connectivity across clouds, and eliminating those organizational silos then join me on Sept 27th at 12 noon ET to hear all about it. Register here
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