Open information technology (IT) standards will enable businesses to design IT environments that are flexible enough to meet future process and application demands, says International Data Corporation sub-Saharan Africa senior research manager George Kalebaila.

Organisations do not know what applications they will use in the next three to five years, but if the infrastructure is agile and flexible enough, they will be able to implement new business processes that meet the requirements of new applications.

“The Internet of Things (IoT) is driving digital transformation across industries, but legacy infrastructure could be preventing organisations from successfully transitioning. Organisations must invest in systems that are not application specific.”

Architectural approaches will be critical, such as software-defined networking that decouples the control logic from the underlying switching and routing and is more flexible, he says.

By making network resources programmable, organisations can easily allocate resources where they are needed in real time.

“This allows the infrastructure to scale and move with time, and changes are made at an application level. The network layer can easily be programmed because the logic is removed from the hardware and included in the software. Thus, a company can easily realign resources to whatever new business requirement it has.”

Open standards also mean that companies can use specialist service providers to efficiently meet specific goals or deploy specific systems. This allows for a multi-vendor environment, provided that such an environment supports such standards.

There has been a definitive shift from a network-centric approach to an application- and service-centric approach. The applications that an organisation needs for their business requirements should dictate the network environment, not the other way around, emphasises Kalebaila.

“The business imperative, therefore, drives the environment. This open standards model enables you to scale and forego some of the capital expenditure investment because you have lighter infrastructure requirements or can transfer risk to a cloud service provider,” he concludes.

The International Data Corporation (IDC) South Africa will discuss building a software-defined enterprise, among other topics, at the IDC South Africa CIO Summit on April 20 and 21 at Emperors Palace, east of Johannesburg. The summit will highlight how organisations will have to reassess their service delivery models and enable automation to become truly digital.

Story highlights:

* Open IT standards can help organisations to support future processes and meet future business demands.
* Open standards also mean that companies can use specialist service providers to efficiently meet specific goals or deploy specific systems in a multi-vendor environment.