Creating a Land of the Long White Cloud

Managing IT workloads is serious business. This challenge has only been accentuated by the fact that “the business” has multiple avenues for building their own as they go, if you are not on top of strategy, new strategy can be built around you.

“This is often called ‘shadow IT’. Whether you call it shadow IT or innovation. Your internal customers now have choice, which is a major challenge for the IT function of a business”

This was one of the critical points made by Nick Smith, the IT strategist and founder of Informed, an organisation that has played a leading hand in for various NSW Government organisations including the Department of Education in assisting them in developing a hybrid cloud platform.

Nick was a guest of iQ3 and Nutanix at a recent breakfast series that looked at how organisations can accelerate transformation with enterprise cloud. Using a recent collaboration with a NSW Government department, Smith shared insights into how IT teams can deploy a hybrid environment.

“We started with the core vision of the department, and worked our way back from that. To achieve that vision we needed to be more agile, we needed to streamline process, and reduce manual output. Overall, the department needed to change the technology output. “

The hybrid environment that Smith showcased was one that allowed the business to innovate. Application developers should have the ability to “spin up” cloud environments in a matter of minutes, and they shouldn’t have to go around core IT to do it.

Along with good execution, Smith noted that although these technical transformations were required, a critical element to a cloud transformation project was integrating people, process and technology. The culture of the IT function needed to transform in order for the department to adopt new technologies that would bring modern efficiencies.

“We had a change manager work alongside the business throughout the project… the project itself was supported by the CIO,” Smith noted these elements were critical to the success.

Hyperconvergence in Your Hybrid Mix

“We spend a lot of time trying to change things that have become a commodity. Which is probably why Nutanix has seen so much growth in this space,” Smith noted.

A key element to building our a successful cloud strategy is simplifying and automating tasks. Smith noted that in choosing Nutanix the Department was able to reduce management resource of the workloads themselves.

Speaking alongside Nick, Mark Lucas, Senior System Engineer for Enterprise at Nutanix noted:

“The beauty of Nutanix is having the ability to put any workload onto our stack. And we have this concept of “one-click” which automates common tasks within everyday environments.”

“As a business we have come full circle, we really are a software company.”