Research Director, Edge Strategies
Research Director, Cloud to Edge Datacenter Trends
| Key Stats | Key Takeaway |
|---|---|
| Only 9% of datacenters function like well-oiled machines, while 25% report delays in deployment because of power and space issues and downtime by human error. | Organizations are embracing continuous risk assessments and operations in favor of audits. |
As organizations reinvented themselves through digital transformation and have evolved to be digital-first organizations — with technology serving as the foundation for innovation and operations — infrastructure organizations need to support an evolving digital infrastructure and their processes and technologies need to evolve with them.
IT asset management as a discipline gained prominence with the advent of IT service management (ITSM) and configuration management databases, as most organizations have IT asset management processes and tools in place with varying levels of maturity. Unfortunately, many were built for legacy infrastructures and did not grow to support the organization as it changed. A contributing factor is the fact that only 9% of respondents in IDC’s Cost of Downtime Survey reported that datacenters function as well-oiled machines.
Digital-first organizations have changed the way IT infrastructure is purchased and deployed. One by-product of the infrastructure transformation of digital-first organizations is that they have also started to transform the procurement process. Increasingly, the line of business procures IT equipment. Democratizing the procurement of IT equipment allows organizations to move faster, which is a core tenet of digital-first organizations, but it is too often accompanied by a lack of processes and controls. Another by-product of digital-first organizations is where datacenters are deployed. IDC predicts that there will be continued growth in enterprise datacenters with significant growth in edge datacenters, which are often deployed outside of traditional datacenters without IT support staff onsite.
Lines of business are increasingly dictating the terms of how IT equipment is procured and deployed, but the CIO is still held accountable for the support, financial return on assets, and compliance, creating a gap that must be filled. Organizations that are trying have relied on manual processes, which do not scale to modern and dynamic environments and are subject to human error. To effectively achieve IT asset management for digital-first companies, enterprises will need an automated process that accounts for new buying processes and architectures.
Digital-first organizations have elevated the business benefits of traditionally IT-centric domains. Important business benefits exist for organizations that successfully deploy automated IT asset management. Leaders may have some or all of the following motivators in mind when undertaking the initiative:
The following trends are important for technology buyers to consider:
The impact of these trends is driving forward-thinking companies to address the following:
To succeed in the future, organizations will need to automate IT asset management and create a digital twin of the company’s entire digital infrastructure to know which people, systems, and third-party organizations access it.
RF Code strives to be an innovator of real-time IT asset management solutions. RF Code’s intelligent hardware and software solutions are engineered to eliminate rack-level costs and risks across the IT enterprise. The company provides continuous asset audit that replaces traditional one-time manual audits and barcode solutions and that fills in the gaps left by network discovery tools. RF Code’s automated solutions are easy to deploy and redeploy, and they can deliver 100% accurate, trustable data in real time. As a result, datacenters can reduce or even eliminate significant rack-level costs and risks associated with:
With patented wire-free active RFID sensors, open APIs, and real-time reporting capabilities, RF Code integrates and boosts the performance of existing IT, facility, and business systems.
IT asset management has been the standard IT practice with varying degrees of maturity in most IT organizations. Convincing senior IT leaders to make an additional investment in RFID-based asset management when they may already have expensive ITSM and/or DCIM will be difficult.
Cloud is the prevailing trend for enterprise CIOs and the whole market. IDC anticipates that in 2023, 58% of all servers will be shipped to cloud, communications, and digital service providers, with only 28% shipped to enterprises. While enterprise datacenters and retail colocations anticipate growth, they are outpaced by the move to cloud.
Most organizations have some competency and infrastructure for IT asset management. However, too often, these have not evolved with the changing digital infrastructure architecture or purchasing methods of digital-first organizations, thus exposing organizations to the risk of financial penalty in the case of external noncompliance and failing to both maximize the financial return of IT assets and contribute to an organization’s sustainability goals, which are increasingly important to executive management.
While it is possible to adapt existing policies and tools for proactive asset management, most organizations do not have the labor resources to accommodate modern, dynamic, digital infrastructures. Organizations looking to reduce risk, improve sustainability, and lower costs will want to consider active RFID and active asset management from RF Code.
RF Code is based in Austin, Texas, and serves over 200 organizations worldwide including the Fortune 500, systems integrators, and value-added resellers. We develop software and wireless devices for tracking hardware assets and for monitoring environmental conditions in datacenters and distributed IT spaces. To learn more or to contact us, visit https://www.rfcode.com/.