Where There’s Smoke – There’s a Moment of Truth for Enterprise IT

You know that data centre your business owns? a palace of blinking-LED’s that give a 'reach out and touch me' impression of control, security and resilience? Now imagine a power surge, some wisps of smoke and the realisation that that the back-up infrastructure is not saving the day as expected. 

As Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian discovered last week, an investment of "hundreds of millions of dollars in technology infrastructure upgrades and systems, including backup systems to prevent what happened yesterday from occurring" counts for naught when you hit your customers with the cancellation of more than 2,000 flights.  

For the world’s largest airline, or any large enterprise, the response to such an event must not be limited to a conclusion which is essentially “do the same but try harder”. It is a moment of truth requiring a broader and cold light of day review of the role, capability and agility of IT in the business.  

Any executives feeling satisfied with incremental efficiencies and performance of the same fundamental model of IT that their enterprise was operating three years ago, need to get up or be forcibly ejected from their rocking chair. There has been significant acceleration in large enterprises applying focus and investment in IT agility and innovation. Those who are still prevaricating over leveraging hyperscale clouds, will have to learn that there is substance behind the advice from a leading analyst to “transform or get left behind”.  

Don’t make the mistake of getting boxed into the detail of one particular incident or arguing why it won’t happen to you; the bigger and better lesson is to start taking action to kill off transformational drag. Owning and operating your own data centres and the blinking-LED infrastructure within, is what Dr Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon.com aptly describes as ‘undifferentiated heavy lifting'.  

Responding to this realisation is the reason why enterprises are the fastest-growing vertical for the world’s largest co-location provider Equinix and why Amazon Web Services (AWS) has rocketed to $10 billion revenue in just 10 years. Not only do such providers operate data centres better than you can, but they empower your ability to drive transformation and the agility your business needs you to deliver.  

Last Wednesday was a 'bad day at the office' for Delta Airlines, but there is no such thing as 'too big to fail', not because of one outage, but because falling behind on transformation will become death by a thousand cuts. For enterprises prepared to act - to not only survive but also thrive, it’s your last call at the gate.