The mobile-cloud era has business and IT under tremendous pressure. It faces a number of challenges as it juggles maintenance and renovation of existing systems, whilst looking to the future and implementing new technology to support growing business needs, says Ian Jansen van Rensburg, senior systems engineering manager at VMware Southern Africa.

Businesses are under pressure to modernise and future-proof their IT infrastructures as more agile companies challenge established players and react with greater speed to the changing pace of business.

The question remains- is it absolutely necessary for businesses to leap off of their current virtualisation and into the mobile cloud era? For those ready to adapt, the mobile-cloud era has created a massive opportunity for innovation and growth, delivering flexibility, control and speed to the market. Many businesses, however, are still struggling to realise this opportunity.

Evolve and benefit
Change is as good as a holiday. Right? When it comes to trends this is not always true if the change is futile and leaves you looking like a fool in fads. But the mobile-cloud era is viewed as the future of IT, and falling behind could cause your enterprise’s demise.

Many IT departments are under pressure from the CEO, CTO or board to modernise IT within the next 12 months. In a recent study commissioned by VMware it was found that IT departments being tasked with modernisation are being told to focus specifically on reducing of the cost of IT, increasing mobility in the workforce, moving more infrastructure into the cloud, implementing hybrid cloud and moving more applications or data into the public cloud.

The Checklist
A software-defined enterprise will reap many rewards after it has gone through the sweat and tears to accelerate IT in the mobile-cloud era. It will deliver new products and services more quickly, get closer to customers and make increasingly mobile workers more productive. A software-defined enterprise allows you to reduce costs, dramatically increase agility while maintaining control of your IT environment and significantly improve business outcomes. Starting to see the bigger picture?

There are three VMware defined key imperatives for the software-defined enterprise. The Software-defined data centre extends the cost and operational benefits of server virtualisation to all data centre infrastructure- compute, networking, security and storage- through an open architectural approach and using automation that enables IT to move at the speed of business.

The hybrid cloud delivers a common management, orchestration, networking and security model that seamlessly extends the data centre to the cloud and supports existing and next-generation application to increase agility. And of course there is mobility of the cloud, it brings the freedom, flexibility and management advantages of virtualisation to organisations that need to support on-the-go, multi-device users.

Don’t fall behind
Everyone who relies on technology knows that change is a constant and the mobile-cloud era is about a lot more than following a trend.

Business’s expectations of IT have accelerated exponentially. IT must enable the enterprise to be able to manage billions of new mobile consumers and millions of new applications and services with flat or declining resources.

A fundamental change in ‘how IT is done’ is required. The enterprise will need to move to a software-defined approach to cost-effectively and competitively serve internal and external customers, ultimately achieving an IT as a service (ITaaS) approach. The move is away from simply maintaining existing operations to investing resources in initiatives that improve top-line revenue and meet key business goals.

How VMware helped IT leverage the virtualisation solution
VMware has already helped IT leverage virtualisation to drive efficiencies and improve IT’s ability to meet business expectations. Through the adoption of VMware’s virtualisation solutions, organisations will save dramatically on an annual basis, so heading into the cloud era with it is simply a logical step.

In the mobile-cloud era, IT is faced with new challenges and opportunities and VMware’s journey to the software-defined enterprise is designed to offer a step-by-step transition to thrive in response to these.

So there is no excuse to be left in the dust of more agile competitors, the sooner an enterprise makes the transition to the cloud, the sooner it can start reaping the benefits.