With ransomware attacks on the rise in the age of Covid-19, security is certainly one of the things keeping IT leaders up at night.  Even with the best security procedures in place, an organization’s data can still be very vulnerable.  So how do you take control of your unstructured data?

Hybrid cloud refers to a cloud infrastructure environment which is a mix of public and private cloud solutions. For instance, apps and data workloads share the same resources between public and private cloud. Organizations can use private cloud environments for their IT workloads and complement infrastructure with public cloud. Instead of organizations buying their own hardware (servers, storage, networking equipment) and maintaining their own data center, which comes with a significant cost and entails cooling, power, and adequate space for equipment, resources are accessed through the cloud.

Is it time to consider a new server? One would think this is an easy question to answer. However, given the long list of factors that should be considered and the ever changing landscape of hardware, this question needs a good bit of thought and some technical analysis. In fact, some organizations set a firm line in the sand with a 3-, 5-, or 7-year end-of-life hardware refresh cycle. IT standards are changing at the speed of light. The large majority of organizations have virtualized their server footprint, thus reducing the number of physical servers and the need to refresh often.

At the center of Data Center Modernization is finding out how to do things faster, smaller, cheaper, and with more flexibility. IT departments within organizations are often challenged in that they generally inherit legacy IT hardware such as older storage arrays, server platforms, and software licensing that doesn’t match their long-term IT transformation goals. Business applications that control critical business functions might be outdated or poorly managed. They have pieces and parts that may or may not be fully integrated or running at optimal levels. Once the IT industry started moving away from monolithic big iron to X86 server architecture, costs came down; however, server and data center sprawl took place. Networking needs grew at this time as well as rack space, which directly increased power demands and the overall IT footprint.