The Future of Infrastructure Is Real-TimeThe Future of Infrastructure Is Real-Time

In today’s fast-moving business world, markets can change overnight. As a result, companies can't afford rigid systems and slow responses. A supply chain company may need to reroute shipments in real-time based on weather conditions, or a retailer may need to scale its technology in seconds on Black Friday.

This is why enterprise technology infrastructure such as storage and compute is flexible and real-time. Partnerships are key to enabling this instant flexibility and scalability, providing a broad range of services that are easily accessible and can be quickly launched.

Customers expect and demand services to be instantly available and agile. Real-time services provide a range of benefits to customers, including cost-efficiency, transparency, scalability, adaptability and speed to deployment.

But it wasn’t always this way.

Previously, in the traditional model, customers bought fixed, static resources, purchasing storage, servers or other infrastructure in advance. However, this could entail buying more than needed, leading to waste, or under-purchasing, leading to delays or outages. With real-time infrastructure, enterprise customers can change their allocation of resources instantly to meet changing demands. Tools such as automation, orchestration and predictive scaling enable instant responses, coordinated workflows across components and proactive anticipation of demand. To ensure that companies are meeting a range of changing demands, a robust network of channel partners is critical.

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Systems with built-in flexibility are the key to making this real-time infrastructure a reality. Real-time infrastructure is the technical underpinning of this flexibility, with the elasticity to adjust on the fly. Companies today want their infrastructure expenses to roughly match their revenue and not be wasted. They know that upfront purchases can lead to underutilized capacity and a consumption gap. As a result, they want incremental solutions that scale over time and reduce this capacity gap.

Technology offers solutions to address the demand for cost-effective infrastructure. Here are some ways:

Subscription Models

Subscription and pay-as-you-go business models are essential to a flexible, real-time infrastructure. These business models enable customers to pay only for what they need and dynamically adjust as needed. This is part of a broader move to the consumerization of infrastructure. IT professionals want the same technology innovation and business models seen in consumer apps like Netflix or Spotify. Meanwhile, for vendors, subscription models enable predictable revenue streams.

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This flexibility is also key for businesses, enabling them to operate efficiently while supporting innovation. Organizations that build a new product or service want to test and verify before committing substantial resources.

Artificial intelligence is a perfect example of an area where companies want to experiment first and then scale quickly. Companies can start with a measured, phased investment, and do testing to determine viability first, then use real-time infrastructure to scale instantly. As a result of the cost savings, customers can invest that back into additional research and development or growth.

Companies should look for vendors that provide subscription models for accessing infrastructure and ensure that that they offer modularity, and the ability to start small and later quickly and easily scale.

Real-time systems also are much more modular and interoperable than previous systems, enabling quick and seamless integration of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, internet of things or 5G networks. As a result, companies don't have to completely overhaul their systems as they once did, but can instantly adapt.

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Fixing Wasted Usage

Flexible, real-time infrastructure reduces wasted capacity through just-in-time provisioning. Instead of making rough estimates on how many resources they will need, companies can make allocations much closer to their actual needs.

There are still improvements to be made. For example, infrastructure is unlike consumer utilities such as water or electricity that have precise metering of capacity used. However, real-time infrastructure vendors can reduce the chunk size − nodes or blades − to better match actual capacity with needs and get closer to these consumer utility models. Vendors are working to bundle storage and other infrastructure components in smaller increments to reduce this consumption gap.

Companies should compare and look to find vendors with the lowest possible increments of usage. The smaller the increments, the less wasted capacity involved in infrastructure purchases.

Supporting Business Growth

Flexible infrastructure drives growth for companies by enabling them to adjust to market conditions or build out new initiatives in a scalable, agile and cost-effective manner. For example, customers can start small and sell a more affordable new product, which can help boost sales. Since their (more affordable) product no longer requires a massive infrastructure investment, they can use cost-savings and any profits to invest back in the product. Then, the company can scale up and drive growth.

Real-time infrastructure also vastly increases a company’s agility, enabling rapid changes to business plans or quick pivots in direction without being handcuffed to prepaid infrastructure requirements. This results in a more dynamic business, accelerating innovation and time to market with quicker decision-making to better compete.

Technology Advantages

Beyond cost savings and business growth, there are technological advantages to a real-time, flexible environment. Previously, deployment cycles were slow, and provisioning and testing took a long time. But real-time infrastructure enables continuous integration, continuous deployment and containerization. This opens the door to agile, rapid DevOps iteration and deployment. Deployment of new applications, which could previously take weeks, can now be deployed in minutes.

Real-time infrastructure also improves transparency and monitoring. Under traditional infrastructure models, there was limited observability, and IT professionals for the most part could only react after an incident. However, with real-time infrastructure, tools can identify and resolve problems such as network outages and adjust quickly. For channel partners, embracing real-time infrastructure means they can offer clients rapid deployment and reduced time-to-market, enabling partners to expand their portfolio of solutions while meeting the evolving demands of their customer base.

When selecting a vendor, companies should not just look for the best price. While price is important, a vendor’s full offering can affect the cost of its infrastructure and the return on investment. For example, if a company chooses a cheaper product that is more difficult it is to manage and maintain, it could cost more staff time devoted to running its infrastructure, which can easily cost more than the cost of simply choosing a better product with a higher price. In addition, if a vendor offers true real-time flexibility, that can translate into tremendous savings on costs as well as gains in revenue from the ability to quickly scale critical projects.

The flexible infrastructure model is the future and will only grow in popularity. Vendors are continually seeking to improve their offerings by, for example, offering smaller units of measure to give even more flexibility to customers. It will take time to create underlying systems to support customers with maximum efficiency of, say, utilities that provide water or electricity. But it will get closer and closer. As a result, real-time consumption will only increase.