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Why Adaptable Infrastructure is More Critical to Businesses Continuity

In an increasingly digital and ever-evolving landscape, this blog will outline some trends we are seeing around infrastructure and business continuity today

Why Adaptable Infrastructure is More Critical to Businesses Continuity

In recentmonths, we've seen a massive organizational shift toward a remote workplace dueto COVID-19. With employees being driven to their organization's remoteinfrastructure to continue their day-to-day tasks, having the proper infrastructurein place can truly make or break a company's ability to survive.

Thesudden and rapid shift to remote is a case study in preparation: organizationswith customer and employee-centric infrastructure were able to successfullyadapt to their new, forced environment, while many other organizations withlegacy infrastructure or lagging business continuity plans scrambled to adjust.This demonstrates that it has never been more critical for organizations to implementsolid infrastructure across the entire spectrum, from cloud and on-premise datacentres, to hardware and bring-your-own-devices (BYOD) and with networksecurity layered throughout.

Infrastructureis a major driver in keeping a company moving. If employees aren't able to haveinstant access to files or work from secure networks, bottom lines are impacted.As the importance of infrastructure rises especially in remote scenarios sotoo does the role of IT in implementing technology that meets business need andthat today's tech-savvy users expect.

In anincreasingly digital and ever-evolving landscape, here are some trends we areseeing around infrastructure today:

Flexibility and agility are key to business continuity

As a company'smost critical operations revolve around technology, it's imperative that thenecessary infrastructure is in place to support dynamic workloads andorganizational needs. It's equally important that infrastructure is agile and ableto adapt to accommodate unforeseen circumstances rather than remain static. COVID-19has unfortunately demonstrated that the reluctance to upgrade resources in atimely fashion, compounded by a tendency to implement the least expensivesolution, can be detrimental to business continuity.

As users become more technologically-savvy, theexpectation of user-friendly infrastructure rises

The modern employee has likely been using technologyoutside of the workplace for quite some time, and expectations have alreadybeen set by the best-designed, easiest-to-consume services of everyday life.This means organizations are now competing with the ease of use of theseservices and applications while still needing to provide security for criticalbusiness data. Infrastructure that can eliminate additional login screens,solve latency issues and automate the provisioning of a service while also maintainingdata security will set organizations up for success moving forward.

A hybrid approach of data centres and cloud storage isdriving the future of infrastructure

Data centre managers face the challenge of needing abudget-friendly storage capacity with flexibility for future workloads as wellas analytics, security, compliance and business continuity. A hybrid cloudsolution provides an innovative approach to meet these demands by leveragingboth cloud and on-premise storage solutions. This offers a more strategicapproach to high-volume data management for organizations because the datastorage is flexible, scalable and always available. Where VPNs or strictlyon-premise data storage solutions are susceptible to outages caused by naturaldisasters and hardware failures, hybrid cloud storage is unaffected by theseproblems.

Network security should fit into every equation

The forced remote environment has allowed networksecurity to show its mettle in facilitating organizational infrastructure orhighlight gaps where attention is sorely needed. When it comes to cloud andhybrid environments, many organizations remain unaware of the shared role thatIT departments and cloud services providers play in data protection controls.Although SaaS applications and public cloud for workloads have been widelyimplemented, these environments remain among the least secure. In addition,cloud security training is less comprehensive than in any other securitytraining area. These are critical vulnerabilities that can be easily exploited.

Now more than ever, organizations must build ITenvironments that are agile, manageable and future-proofed while keeping costsdown and operations running smoothly. The key is having a solutions provider tohelp transform IT infrastructure into a strategic business driver, so organizationscan stay focused on long-term, innovative projects rather than day-to-dayoperations.

To learn more about how CDW Canada can provide you with the tools and expertise to assess your current IT infrastructure, help you plan your move to the cloud or manage your on-premise and cloud-based infrastructure, visit cdw.ca/datacentre.