User Manual

> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation
16
u So, what does digital transformation mean for MTDCs? As
with any other commercial organisations, the impacts will be far
reaching:
1. Most critically the requirements and expectations of customers
will change. The foundations for digital transformation will be
the business strategy and usually these are based on meeting
customer requirements profitably. Just as the customers of the
MTDC will be facing disruption so will the MTDC itself.
2. The commercial MTDC needs as colocation has always
done to run parallel to the evolution of enterprise data
infrastructure. This means the development of o-prem
private cloud, interconnection to public cloud providers, the
hosting as necessary of the client company’s migration into
SaaS and platform development. It is quite possible that some
of this transformation will require more scalable and ecient
infrastructure than is available in-house and therefore this will
bring in MTDCs. The attitudes expressed to digital transformation
as a series of future uncertainties means that a managed cloud
service component may be of value.
“We divide our IT into 2 parts – the first are internal systems which
we keep in house, the second tend to use cloud based solutions
because of the flexibility.” [Developer]
“Colocation is the preferred choice for a lot of enterprise
architecture. Cloud is the preference for desktop and SaaS type
applications – email, mobility, collaboration & communications etc.
Then there is a layer of internal systems that can’t easily be migrated
– call those legacy IT that we are formulating a strategy to deal with
– they may be in colocation facilities or they may be on premise.
High performance computing is currently all on premise and is
likely to stay that way – we can deliver that at a lower cost currently
than we would achieve externally – if it was possible to buy from a
cloud vendor at all. We have a real estate division and we eectively
lease the space from them – but to every intent it is an internal
operation.” [Primary Industry]
“I think we will need to look more closely at a number of
outsourcing options and experts so we can manage all of this.”
[Business Services]
3. Digital transformation will also mean that the facilities oered
by MTDCs will need to evolve into service hubs where the key
operational principles are demand-driven, oering flexibility and
scalability. The major applications of transformative technologies
in data centers to date have been in operations and management
but the technology now has the potential to take this further.
The MTDC as a ‘one size fits all’ proposition will not survive much
longer, therefore one key disruption will be to evolve a standard
of intelligent management that allows the facility to customise
the requirement to meet customer needs. This process has
started already in terms of variable Tier levels, dierent levels of
separation and security, dierent service profiles and more open
systems but emerging technologies can be used to get this to a
stage where it is genuinely on-demand and where, through the
application of AI and machine learning it may be based on a level
of demand that the client themselves do not have to specify;
it is adapted automatically. For this sector, this represents the
convergence of IT and OT.
“Of late, we have developed a far reaching cloud strategy that
will eventually be the first choice for all business systems and the
transition to cloud delivery of enterprise applications and desktop
and mobile services is well underway.” [Primary Industry]
4. The application of digital transformation can be used to make
the models used for charging and specifying SLAs more
sophisticated and more based on ‘real time’. Possibly the key
disruption that this represents for the MTDC is that it reverses the
trend towards cloud. Cloud in dierent variants becomes one
oering among a number.
5. Part of the forward strategy for the MTDC needs to recognise
the forward role of edge computing and where the facility will
sit in relation to that. This depends upon whether the provider’s
IoT strategy looks outside the facility across the networks that
connect the data center to external data sources.
6. As part of the transformation process, the MTDC will need
to organise its personnel and business processes around the
process, and it will need also to determine the best partners and
suppliers to meet its objectives.
The MTDCs interviewed match the prevailing view from other
research – while the opportunity of digital transformation is
apparent to all, as is the competitive necessity of embarking on the
digital journey, most of these companies are at the start of it.
“We will fit out as demanded with high performance computing in
a hyper-converged configuration to allow for data analytics – all
those emerging technologies will become main stream.”
[IT Services] u