BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here
Edit Story

Unlocking Innovation in the Virtual Era

Dell Technologies

The role of the CIO is changing. Gone are the days of measuring success by utilization rates and price per watt. Today’s CIO is tasked with driving the company’s mission, whether that's providing more children with better education, improving the quality of healthcare or creating a flexible work environment. This isn’t an easy adjustment to make. It requires a strategy for putting the right tools, in the right hands of a workforce that can make a real difference to the bottom line. Technology innovation is critical for organizations of every size to compete and thrive. To be successful in what we term the Virtual Era, you have to:

  • Push the technology envelope. Virtualize your infrastructure from end-to-end to transform your data center into a unified, dynamic IT environment.
  • Take on new challenges. Embrace new strategies to solve tough problems, like managing the data deluge and securing information on mobile devices.
  • Stay open. Don’t let proprietary solutions limit your ability to choose the best technologies to empower your people. Industry standards and innovation go hand-in-hand.

These three recipes will help you to embrace the Virtual Era:

1. Simplify, integrate, automate. To thrive in the Virtual Era, your data center has to respond dynamically to changing demands. Taking advantage of innovative cloud solutions, allow you to achieve flexibility that doesn’t exist with many of the incompatible, ad hoc solutions deployed across IT organizations.

Once you clear stumbling blocks, such as patched-together systems and manually managed processes, you can converge your IT operations. Virtualize your server, storage and network infrastructure to gain the most efficiencies. This positions you to turn your data center into a fully automated private cloud.

You don’t have to rebuild your IT from scratch to get these benefits. An industry standard-approach enables you to mix and match existing data center investments with a wide variety of technology innovations.

2. Make your data work for you. Virtualization can help you converge your IT and automate your data center, but it won’t help you make sense of your data.

CIOs across the globe keep throwing more disks on the rack to control the data deluge, but this only leads to storage sprawl. It doesn’t address the underlying problem.

Just storing your data is not enough. True success comes when you turn that data into business value. Choose fluid, workload-driven solutions that can organize data based on relevance, and move it seamlessly through the business without downtime or disruption.

Instead of buying more capacity, shrink your storage volume with data reduction technologies, such as deduplication and compression.

3. Champion innovation. CIOs need to be the visionaries of the virtual era. They need to usher in the opportunities that drive the mission ― even when those opportunities present IT challenges. Mobile device consumerization is a great example.

Smartphones and consumer tablets weren’t designed for enterprise business, so they’re not easy to manage and secure. But they offer advantages no business should be without:

  • Increased productivity through workplace flexibility
  • Better work/life balance
  • Continuous contact with customers, partners and colleagues
  • Unprecedented access to customer insights through social networking

Incorporate mobile consumer devices into your enterprise with services that can manage a wide range of smartphones and tablets. And secure the mobile data with desktop virtualization. Desktop virtualization separates the data from the device and stores it in a data center. The data stays in one place, but the mobile users and their devices can go anywhere.