| | AUGUST 20248CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONYou may be asking yourself what technology debt has to do with driving business innovation. The answer is related to using the work others have done as `late' adopters' advantage to skip the traditional risks when moving to innovative technology as a closer follower. To explain this better, we will explore both types of tech debt, infrastructure and application, to understand how these can be leveraged to help create an innovative technology outcome to better position your business outcomes.Let us start with infrastructure tech debt, defined as old servers, physical data storage, security, or networking hardware that has reached the end of support life (or beyond). As the most common is server and data storage, we will focus mostly on these. There are two types of tech debt models here:· Physical Server/Storage your company owns (or your service provider owns) where the applications and data exist directly on this physical gear.· Virtual Server/Storage where there is physical gear supporting multiple virtual server and storage instances. Do not confuse this with cloud servers/storage, as I am referencing the scenario where you (or your service provider) own this gear, and it has aged out. In either case above, you have unsupported hardware that needs to be replaced as it will fail at some point and will no longer have security patching available to protect it. Given the advancements in true cloud data center models, you have the opportunity to remove this IT burden (that adds no value to your organization) to one of the various cloud providers (Azure, AWS, Google, etc.). The advantage of this move usually can be summarized across:· No upfront capital expense.· Reduced IT support and complexity to manage these devices (OS patching, BIOS updates, etc.).· More IT focus can and should be diverted to business technology initiatives vs. keeping the servers running.· Easier to find support for any of the main cloud platforms.· Better disaster recovery functionality as you can have geographic regions baked in. On this note, you may think you have good DR if you have a local hosting provider and are on a Virtual Server that has another Virtual Server failover on the farm with it. Ask yourself, what happens if the Data Center itself goes away for recovery time/effort (a true cloud model considers this upfront and allows for geographic locations for DR).· Unlimited horsepower to scale as needed (or retracted if needed).By Peter Hogan, Senior Vice President of Information Technology, Compana Pet BrandsTRANSFORMING TECHNOLOGY DEBT INTO INNOVATIONPeter Hogan
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