HYBRID IT - BCG PLATINION

The pandemic created a gold-rush as companies rapidly looked to establish infrastructure which worked remotely, often in a matter of weeks. Businesses needed solutions, strategies and architectures built around agility and responsiveness in times of serious disruption. While many turned to the cloud, there is another solution which met both the needs of cloud deployment and on-premise data centres: composable infrastructure.

With composable infrastructure, IT teams can provision on-premises infrastructure just as quickly and painlessly as public cloud resources can be acquired and deployed. But what is composable IT?

Composable architecture uses software and APIs to abstract and manage compute, storage and networking resources. While cloud and hybrid deployments are pre-configured, composable infrastructure can be re-assembled and re-configured to provision the exact-sized environments each workload needs. In short, composable infrastructure is a way to manage a businesses infrastructure as a service, more like a software artifact with version control, state management, and standard integration patterns. It allows for easily scalable tasks and takes away the need to physically configure hardware – saving on time and money.

Driving the development of composable IT

The key driving the development and adoption of composable architecture is the fact that most businesses have hundreds of applications all running at the same time, which is difficult to manage. This becomes a challenge that composable infrastructure can overcome. Modern IT functions need to deliver agility to meet high demands from businesses, scale to support business growth and enable resilient & cost effective operations. This puts businesses ahead of their competitors in all areas. Composability enables enterprises to combine modular and interchangeable business and technology capabilities. This is key to having agile, resilient and cost effective operations, enabling businesses to quickly and easily build, adapt, re-pivot and innovate. This delivers a high degree of flexibility, better resource utilisation and lower infrastructure costs.

Connecting composable IT with cloud and hybrid data centres

While composable IT architectures are typically built with on-premise data centres in mind, throughout the pandemic we have seen that they can be connected to existing cloud & hybrid data centre deployments via a robust software management layer. This software management layer must achieve two crucial things: discovering available resource pools and dynamic resource sharing.

By identifying available resource pools, the IT architecture will be able to assess, review and determine the availability and utilisation of all IT resource pools – ensuring that there is compute and storage space for operates. Meanwhile, dynamic resource sharing will mean that the architecture can optimise the utilisation and provisioning of the right resources where and when needed, speeding up processes.

Addressing composable challenges

That said, there are two major challenges facing composable architectures, the first of which is integration complexity. Composable architectures mean dis-aggregated capability & technology components, which need to be connected & integrated. The more connected components involved, the more complex the necessary integrations will be – creating the potential for errors and poorly managed infrastructure.

Another challenge that arises when using composable IT architectures is governance. Composable IT architectures help achieve rapid provisioning, development, deployment and faster innovation through decentralisation – but this means that governance is a critical consideration. Ensuring that orchestration, interoperability, resilience & security are all factored in is a considerable challenge for any organisation and must be successfully tackled to ensure composable architectures work.

Composable IT is now becoming the key element in shifting businesses into a quicker way of running and with constant technological advancements, it is shaping businesses systems and allowing them more time with less costs. Composable IT will become the most sought after system for the most advanced businesses with complex application and infrastructure needs, or for those with the most mature IT capabilities, optimising for flexibility, agility and cost.

Ultimately, composable IT is a critical enabler for these businesses by enabling them to: provision and deploy infrastructure on demand, enabling scale and business growth; design and implement a more sustainable and resilient IT setup.