Message to IT: Modernize or else

Increasingly, I hear business managers complain that IT just isn’t delivering. As a result, more and more, they’re going around IT and turning to cloud services, commercial mobile apps, and good old outsourcing to get the job done.

If that doesn’t make you swallow hard, it should. Given the economic outlook, no matter what you think your FY12 budget looks like right now, additional investment in IT may be scarce — unless, perhaps, you can plausibly guarantee IT will be able to deliver at a much higher level. If you can’t step it up, more and more of what IT does may fall into the hands of outside providers.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Find out what’s the real state of the cloud, circa 2001. | Keep up on the day’s tech news with the InfoWorld Daily newsletter. ]

Here’s my quick take on what IT needs to address in order to take things to the next level and provide what the business needs and wants. In the coming months, expect InfoWorld to expand its coverage of these areas.

Get serious about the private cloud

Yes, I hate the cloud nomenclature as much as you do. But virtualization alone is not enough, even though it has been a huge shot in the arm for data center efficiency. For IT in large to midsize companies to achieve qualitatively greater economies of scale, certain workloads must behave like public cloud services.

Together, virtualization, private cloud software, data center automation, and infrastructure convergence represent an opportunity to consolidate compute, storage, and network resources into a shared fabric that scales like crazy, slashes the admin-to-server ratio, supports reconfiguration on the fly — and offloads some of the gruntwork to stakeholders themselves.

With virtualization as a step one, this is a transformation happening in plain sight: Moving from the old mode of dedicated infrastructure to shared, virtualized resources is a profound and difficult change. Here’s a partial list of what you need to make the whole transition.

Create a service catalog. A private cloud requires a top-down view: You work with the business side to determine what the standardized services should be, whether email or a vertical app used across business units, and provision your infrastructure to accommodate those workloads — which can be administered using advanced virtualization and workload management.

Set up self-service. Stakeholder, provision thyself! For every standard service, let business units click their way through HTML forms to get what they need — much as they would with a public cloud service. You know how airlines prefer you to make reservations through the website rather than call? You can stave off those phone calls, too, and have the user do the work.

Establish a chargeback system. More accurately, this is typically a “showback” system that reports the costs of resources consumed by stakeholders. While providing this sort of visibility sounds like a nice thing to have, it’s actually a necessity. When resources were dedicated to projects, tracking costs was easy. When those resources are shared, it’s almost impossible without metering tools. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life recalculating infrastructure costs in a spreadsheet.

Make devops a priority. Improving the efficiency of app dev may be the most compelling reason of all for a private cloud. Today, developers must wait impatiently for operations to fill requests for specific test resources and configurations, which change along the way, leading to more delays. Put self-service in the hands of developers — a trend known as devops — and they can provision and reprovision their own environments, yielding more and better apps. Plus, devops software enforces workflows to help development projects stay on track.

Roll out data center automation. Advanced virtualization management tools are great for moving around workloads, but at some point, you have to deal with bare metal. At a minimum, data center automation software offers automated server provisioning, which vastly reduces the time spent on hardware setup.

Converge your infrastructure. This comes last on the list because it demands the greatest capital investment. But ultimately, you’ll miss the full benefit of the private cloud without melding the data and storage networks into one — and buying servers purpose-built with the bandwidth to be monster virtualization hosts. Also, moving to a flatter network architecture and replacing low-bandwidth switches with 10Gbps equipment enables you to slice and dice bandwidth as your workloads scale and you move those workloads around.

Taken together, all of the above sounds like a ridiculously tall order, especially in the face of a down economy. Remember, however, that you don’t need to put everything in place at once. And if you prove the value of one — say, rolling out devops results in a much shorter time to market for apps that serve strategic business initiatives — the more likely you are to get funding for others. At most of these phases you’re trading a modest capital investment for major drop in operational costs.

Also note that, despite how this post began, I’m not suggesting that IT should stand in the way of all “consumerized” IT services and try to handle everything itself. That’s neither possible nor desirable. Instead, IT needs to stay one step ahead and objectively assess what it should keep and what should be handled by an iPhone app, a SaaS application, or a consultancy. Stay proactive and figure out how to choose and manage consumerized services — or, more accurately, the policies around them — and you win both ways.

The time has passed for tiresome buzz phrases: private cloud, infrastructure convergence, programmable data center, and the rest. The plain fact is that IT needs to get its act together and deliver what the business needs and wants to avoid chronic underfunding. If you can’t execute, it will be harder and harder to convince the CFO to let go of the money.

We’ve heard the “do more with less” refrain for so long it’s a crime. Well, with an economy like the one we’re stuck with, that refrain will only get louder. Choose your battles for new investment wisely. With careful planning and a little luck, and a new set of technology building blocks to work with, you may actually be able to meet that obnoxious demand without working 24/7.

This article, “Message to IT: Modernize or else,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Eric Knorr’s Modernizing IT blog, and for the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld on Twitter.