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agility @ a glance

Services

Services (17)

Virtualisation:

Organisations have adopted data centre virtualisation technologies in order to reduce cost, improve resiliency and enhance agility. However even today many companies are still unable to reap the full benefits of virtualisation due to resource constraints and the complexity of enabling virtualisation across the data centre. Because virtualisation touches all aspects of ICT infrastructure, including server, storage and networking infrastructures, a successful virtual deployment requires a holistic approach.Many virtualisation projects struggle with initial deployment times, achieving adequate performance and scalability and protecting their virtual assets effectively.

agility consultants have proven experience in working with our clients to get the most out of their virtualisation investments - we support design, implementation, optimisation and maintaining virtualisation implementations of all sizes.

Cloud:

Today ICT departments face unprecedented challenges. Internal business customers continue to demand rapid delivery of innovative services to respond to outside threats and opportunities. Hamstrung by limited staff and budget, ICT departments struggle to keep up, often exhausting resources while simply trying to support their organisation. In this environment, the options have been few: delay innovation that fuels the business or allow business users to procure services without ICT involvement and therefore sacrificing reliability, security, compliance and governance standards. In a conventional ICT environment maintaining existing systems consumes the majority of budgets, leaving little to reinvest in growing the business. Cloud Computing technology promises to break this cycle and unlock resources to fuel innovation.

agility can assist businesses to embrace cloud as a cohesive strategy and supports clients in designing and operating their cloud environments, improving ICT efficiency, agility and reliability, and therefore helping IT drive innovation. agility supports clients to evolve technical foundations, organisational models, operational processes and financial measures to establish both a cloud infrastructure and cloud operations model that delivers the greatest benefit. In other words, agility cloud solutions maximise the potential of cloud computing:

  • Deliver new IT services that fuel business growt;
  • More rapidly create and deploy services that differentiate the business;
  • Transform IT into a source of innovation; and
  • Unlock IT resources and reinvest in services that advance business goals.

 

At a fundamental level an organisation's ICT infrastructure is expected to meet the computing needs and expectations of the business. This is especially true in the provision of infrastructure for hosting applications that are relied upon for the daily operation of the business. Significant variation in application performance can negatively impact on user experience and is highly visible and problematic to the business.

Many applications are designed with unique requirements. For example a heavily transactional application can place the underlying network, server and storage infrastructure under considerable load during periods of increased activity. Where the business requires a service or application to be highly available there may be additional demands placed upon the supporting infrastructure to provide clustering, failover, redundancy and the flexibility to scale out and consume additional resources when required.

An appropriate application infrastructure solution design considers and combines the needs of the business and application requirements in order to deliver a resilient, performing  and seamless experience to the end-user.

agility consultants have proven experience in working with our clients to deliver reliable application infrastructure solutions across a range of applications and infrastructure. We are in constant exchange with major software vendors to be trained in the latest available technology to enable our clients to leverage the feature enhancements available and to support their business in the best possible way.

 

Improvement needs a vision – if an ICT department does not have a formally documented and approved strategy and an associated roadmap it will struggle to engage in sufficient levels of proactive management. Instead the available resources will be consumed leveraging a fire fighting mentality which leads to increased levels of risk, operating inefficiencies and ultimately poor outcomes for the business.
Symptoms of poor, or absent, IT planning include:

  • Reactionary rather than pro-active attitude towards problem fixing;
  • Ongoing infrastructure capacity constraints;
  • Inefficient use of capital and operational funds;
  • Inability to deliver on business requirements in a timely manner;
  • Inappropriate use of resources;
  • Defensive attitude of IT help desk staff;
  • Allow business users to commission services without ICT involvement and therefore sacrificing reliability, security, compliance and governance standards; and
  • Loss of management support in IT service delivery.

A good quality IT strategy however will help management to find the right balance between business usual activities, planned projects and innovation that delivers competitive advantages. Having a vision also supports the obtaining of funding to enables key IT initiatives that would otherwise remain underfunded.

agility specialises in aligning business requirements to technology solutions - creating realistic ICT strategies and roadmaps support this process. We tailor each project to exact requirements as ICT strategies are as unique as our clients.

 

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