IT’s role in business has changed. Where it once was regarded as a cost center, it is now often considered to be a revenue creator. This evolution has fundamentally shifted IT organizations’ priorities when it comes to infrastructure design and architecture. Today, a major emphasis is being placed on acceleration.

Consider that 59% of IT decision makers surveyed by ESG say that data is their business, and 22% of respondents indicated that they plan to develop new data-centric products and services in the next two years. In fact, nine out of ten IT organizations say they must move faster than three years ago when deploying applications, infrastructure, and services, with 41% of them accelerating by more than 50%. Additionally, 67% report that they are under pressure to accelerate IT infrastructure provisioning and deployment to support developers and line-of-business teams.

With everything moving so fast now, businesses must enhance agility and operational efficiency across their entire IT infrastructure landscape, especially within the data center. Public cloud services provide a lot of advantages, but on premises applications and infrastructure will continue to be a necessity. Operational agility, flexibility, and acceleration will be essential everywhere apps live—whether on- or off-premises.

Unfortunately, there is simply not enough budget and people available to accelerate operations sufficiently using traditional systems alone. Every budget or personnel allocation comes with significant opportunity costs. These allocations “steal resources” away from digital initiatives that could result in revenue increases and operational improvements for the business.

Traditional architectures are rigid, not agile. They hinder organizations’ ability to upgrade and scale their environments by requiring prohibitive upfront outlays that siphon budget money away from meaningful initiatives. That’s why businesses that desire more cloud-like agility, both on-premises and across their hybrid cloud environments, are investing in:

• As-a-service consumption models for on-premises infrastructure—especially storage, since it plays a key role in successful data management.

• Upgradeable architectures—infrastructure that can be easily upgraded while data and services stay online to expedite users’ access to modern functionality.

Of course, some organizations may not be ready to make a full-scale transition from a traditional CapEx model to a managed as-a-service model. Fortunately, they have options. They can still make incremental steps to modernize their onpremises infrastructure and start reaping the associated acceleration-related benefits very quickly