Businesses risk losing track of infrastructure

Organisations are at risk of losing sight of their technology infrastructure as they seek out smarter, faster and cheaper solutions in 2015, and beyond, according to TIBCO Software.

“With a continual drive to find new ways of doing things to improve business outcomes, organisations are looking to replace legacy systems,” said Stuart Rees, TIBCO’s regional vice president, Australia and New Zealand. “This process is highlighting the fact that there are parts of their technological infrastructure they simply do not understand.”

Rees says that while organisations might understand generally what goes in and what comes out of the system, the business logic and operational code is not well documented or understood.

“This is one of the reasons that many systems are so old in the first place,” he says. “If organisations don’t start to address this moving forward they will find that their infrastructure is not supportable long-term.”

Rees adds that the move to cloud will add to this issue as organisations simply replace old systems by passing them off to third-party cloud providers without addressing the lack of understanding of the system and why they have it. “This is counterintuitive to futureproofing the organisation and may decrease its ability to adapt and adjust to changing business conditions,” he adds.

Rees says the rush to find smarter, cheaper ways of doing business is likely to drive five trends in 2015:

1. Social data. While organisations will continue to derive value from data to understand their customers better, the key will be ignoring social data that isn’t relevant. There is so much data available that successful organisations will be those that can cut through all the noise and evaluate the data in context.

2. From big data to fast data. The explosion of big data means more data from more sources, but the reality is that most organisations won’t even look at the data until the next day, or later.

Organisations need to make decisions based on what is actually happening and take action while the data is still valid rather than relying solely on predictive models.

Successful organisations will be those that realise that every bit of data has an expiration date, and if they don’t move quickly enough they will miss out on deriving any value from the data at all.

Fast data is the way forward for organisations looking to drive real business outcomes from their data. It involves the processing of big data in real time to gain instant awareness and take action when it matters most.

3. Mobile: size does matter. There will still be proliferation of mobile devices, just not small ones like phones. The nature of mobile information will continue in that people will not be tied to a desk but the device of choice will be a tablet or laptop rather than a phone.

While the phone will provide a taster, people will turn to tablets and laptops simply because the phones are too small for accessing and working in business applications.

4. Cloud. The concept of cloud largely still means different things to different organisations and industries. However, the granularity of exactly what organisations will get will become greater as organisations become smarter and demand definable benefits and functions from vendors and cloud providers, and as cloud as a concept moves beyond commoditisation to being truly defined.

5. Business intelligence (BI). Organisations will start to hand the BI reigns to more employees from a range of departments. This will let businesses do more with their data and gain more insights. It also means that higher levels of security and training are needed for employees to ensure data doesn’t end up in the wrong hands.

In addition, with real-time intelligence constantly evolving, BI systems can now automatically identify a business issue that needs to be addressed without having to analyse every single piece of big data.

Businesses will increasingly ignore data as their systems become more intelligent. For example, financial institutions see millions of transactions each day but they only want to know about those that may pose a risk to business.

Image courtesy pyntofmyld under CC