The life cycle of IT grows shorter every year as new players enter the market and disrupt the industry with cutting-edge digital practices and processes.
What does this mean? This means a shift in terms of customer expectation. Customers have been empowered by technology, and now they want more.
This puts your IT department under pressure. What’s more, your legacy IT systems – once certainly up to the job – are now struggling towards obsolescence. IT modernization is the only course of action.
Why Modernize?
You have a number of different devices, all managed by your team. You have an extensive network connecting your locations, perhaps with MPLS (multiprotocol label switching). You have a datacenter, or perhaps two or three. You use a variety of software programs, perhaps on a subscription basis. You are aware of constant changes to security best practices, industry standards, and regulatory guidelines.
All of this can be difficult and expensive to maintain, especially once you have factored in:
- Daily support across all devices
- Replacing network equipment
- Replacing and updating legacy hardware and software
Your business needs to be able to survive. More than this, it needs to be able to thrive. This is simply not possible without modernization of your IT systems.
The Benefits of IT Modernization
Safeguard Bottom Line
Traditional views of modernization concentrate on direct reduction of costs. For example, modern automotive technology gives us a way to reduce our fuel bills and the need for expensive repairs. Of course, IT modernization achieves this, but it goes about it in a different way.
Think about IT and its impact on customer experience. Through modernization, you will also find yourself improving customer experience, retaining customers for longer, and gaining more value from them across their entire lifecycle.
Improve IT Staff Efficiencies
The underlying reason that makes investing in your IT team so worthwhile is how hard they work to support your organization. Security is an ongoing issue, as is productivity, operational agility, and other elements. All of these factors come together to keep your business operating at its best.
What happens if your IT staff cannot do their jobs properly? If they run into problems and inefficiencies? At best, it costs your organization money. At worst, the whole system breaks down.
Modernization frees up these members of staff, giving them the ability to work on projects more suited to their skill sets.
Reduce Time to Market
Investing in products and services is crucial for businesses looking to expand or to increase their market share. However, this investment comes to nothing if these products and services are delayed in reaching the market.
IT modernization streamlines the process, making it much easier to launch products and services into the market without delay. Your product launches rely on speedy market feedback that will help you identify gaps that can be exploited, as well as testing data and other pieces of information that enable you to modify or alter the offering to optimize its effectiveness. A modernized approach to IT provides this.
Improve Security
Cybersecurity – and, by extension, IT security in general – is not to be taken lightly. Forty-four percent of Canadians said that they would be reluctant to do business with a firm that had suffered a data breach. When we consider that as many as 58 percent of businesses have reported suffering downtime as a result of such a breach (on average, 23 hours of downtime is reportedly the norm in Canada), this translates to a great many businesses who are having their reputations damaged by cyber criminals.
No business owner would voluntarily put their firm in harm’s way. However, by clinging on to legacy IT systems, many businesses are doing just that. Threats are constantly evolving, and having up-to-date, cutting-edge IT systems in place helps you to ensure that you are receiving the right level of protection. What’s more, with digital cloud transformation of IT, updates can be managed far more easily, safeguarding your systems against potential danger.
IT Modernization gives your business the foundation to really leverage the from advanced technology and gain an important market advantage in the process.
Contact us if you’d like to learn more.
Written By:
Caroline Blivet
As Softlanding's Marketing Lead, Caroline and is responsible for driving lead generation, developing a go-to-market strategy and, delivering marketing campaigns. Outside of work, Caroline enjoys hiking the beautiful trails of British Columbia.
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