Productivity, sustainability, innovation, collaboration, security, customer satisfaction—the promise of digital transformation to deliver any number of game-changing results is driving organizations’ strategies to accelerate growth in an uncertain climate.
But as organizations increasingly migrate infrastructure to multi-cloud environments and incorporate such emerging technologies as edge computing and internet of things (IoT), the complexity of information technology (IT) is impeding success, according to 82% of respondents to a recent survey of large enterprises around the world.
Conversely, 46% of the survey’s respondents said reducing IT complexity drives innovation. And as leading organizations in a range of sectors—including telecommunications, government, automotive, and health care—transition to multi-cloud, some identify IT simplicity as critical to their efforts to strengthen operations, increase productivity, accelerate innovation, improve customer experience, and fortify cybersecurity.
Leading organizations in the finance, energy, and technology sectors illustrate how businesses can thrive when they strategize to overcome IT complexity.
Powering Financial Inclusion
iOCO, a South African banking-as-a-service (BaaS) provider, assists large banks in advancing financial inclusion to support underserved populations in this economically diverse nation.
Recognizing that traditional financial lending often excludes small businesses, iOCO aimed to use its technology to drive change. For its partner banks to deliver innovative financial solutions to these underserved sectors, iOCO needed to leverage the full capabilities of its own mainframe.
Through use of the right software tools to open up, manage, and scale their environment, iOCO’s BaaS offering can now help banks reach new markets with their services faster—and without the traditional costly capital expenses.
“Nothing can match the transaction performance of a mainframe,” says Johan Bosch, iOCO’s executive director for managed services. By using technology that could simplify iOCO’s mainframe infrastructure, Bosch says, “We can deliver the services at 25% of the cost when measured against stand-alone banking environments.”
Strengthening Security
U.K.-based utility SGN distributes gas to nearly 6 million customers in the U.K. and sets its top priorities as customer satisfaction and safety.
But the IT complexity of any utility—given their intricate networks of connected applications, cloud services, and IoT sensors and infrastructure—creates many points of vulnerability, which contribute to some wariness in the energy sector about migrating operations to the cloud.
When SGN set itself the objective of migrating its complex network of workloads to a multi-cloud environment by 2019, one top concern—beyond increasing agility, cutting costs, and enabling greater innovation—was to strengthen its cybersecurity and minimize the risk of threats to its workforce and its customers.
SGN implemented an integrated security ecosystem that established a central network to correlate all information and access the world’s largest civilian threat intelligence database, which helps the company see threats to its operations emerge, even from around the world, and update its environments accordingly. With these real-time insights, SGN can better respond to threats in real time and do more to prevent danger.
Beyond tightening its cybersecurity, the simplicity of SGN’s multi-cloud network allows the company to increase the productivity and collaboration of its remote workforce. Even better, its clear commitment to safety boosts its customers’ trust.
Making Complexity Make Sense
Japan-based managed service provider Fujitsu oversees large, complex environments for enterprise customers in Central Europe that incorporate a range of network infrastructures and such technologies as internet, internal access, and firewalls.
To optimize its performance for customer data centers in Germany, Fujitsu needed to simplify complex environments, providing tools for efficiency to help engineers access and triage incidents, manage infrastructure, and automate business processes such as customer onboarding. One area of concern: monitoring and alerting systems generating excessive false-alarm “noise.”
Fujitsu determined it needed to offer a single-pane operational dashboard to help customers and internal staff monitor inventory, performance, and real-time network health and use high-scale performance analysis technology that could store, analyze, and display massive amounts of information.
Enhancing its network operations (NetOps) now helps Fujitsu quickly identify the sources of performance problems, and its stability improvements have dramatically reduced alarm noise from its customers’ monitoring and alerting systems; increased visibility into application traffic, allowing earlier detection of abnormal patterns; and boosted root-cause analysis to improve the speed of resolution.
New Tools of the Trade
Whether using mainframes to strengthen collaboration and ideation, introducing NetOps to find more signal and less noise, or implementing an integrated cybersecurity ecosystem, all of these improvements are based on simplifying IT complexity.
For sector-leading organizations, a key to success is to reduce IT complexity by teaming with a partner that can introduce simplicity and expertise to their operations and help them meet and exceed their goals.
To learn more, visit us at software.broadcom.com.
