What does true dependability mean when it comes to modern enterprise infrastructure?

Growth is the lifeblood of business. It drives organizations to innovate, expand beyond borders, and evolve into new avenues and ventures. Yet it's difficult to grow sustainably without incorporating layers of complexity into the heart of the organization.

While much of this complexity will be priced in – more products and customers, for example – there can be unforeseen consequences to growth, some specific to the sector and others unique to the business itself. Examples might include regulatory hurdles or role overlaps with a broader workforce.

Complexity creep often flies in under the radar, given it's a byproduct of the fundamentals that the business should otherwise be focusing on. In turn, it can draw bandwidth away from increasing value and growing the business further. That's why it's important to invest in infrastructure solutions – including storage systems – that are dependable, flexible, and scale with the business. Doing so means taking on the challenge of shifting demands head-on, and ensuring that data remains consistently protected and recoverable as the organization grows.

Future-proofing an organization's foundational layers in this way is crucial for managing long-term complexity, especially given the need to minimize security risks and maximize gains from AI. But its reliability, flexibility, and dependability are king, and critical elements that enterprises must focus on when choosing their long-term provider and future partner.

The rising complexity of modern business

An organization's foundations must handle the many and varied layers of complexity that arise over time, including the different data streams, as well as how to operate within the varying regulatory regions in which the business is based.

"As they expand, they inevitably become more complex. Their organizational structures develop layers upon layers, their reporting lines become tangled, and their people – from senior management through to the front line – find it harder to get work done," McKinsey's Suzanne Heywood, Rubén Hillar and David Turnbull wrote in a report on how to handle enterprise complexity.

Not all complexity is bad, and it can often be a sign of an organization's growing stature. Elements that might contribute include the number of customers, the number of products or services delivered, the number of people employed, or the number of countries operated in, as well as how far and wide different elements of the business collaborate and integrate.

On the other hand, elements of complexity can work against a business. According to the McKinsey research, these factors include the level of regulation a business faces, how quickly this regulation changes, how far roles and responsibilities are duplicated, how often the organizational structure changes, and how far the activity of competitors might demand operational changes to ensure continued profitability.

Modern enterprise infrastructure must be configured to handle the needs of a growing business while helping it swerve around unforeseen challenges in the future. That's why a secure foundation is essential to building layers of dynamic infrastructure on top that can provide reliability and flexibility. Systems that can manage increasing volumes of data are important, as are factors like high performance, storage capacity, low latency, and efficiency. Storage units should be easy to manage, so as to help minimize costs, while also boasting reliability, which translates into customer experience and user productivity – and must be paired with a dependable cyber resilience foundation that can keep up with that same scale and complexity

Laying the foundations for resilient infrastructure

Dependability is crucial when choosing an infrastructure provider and configuring systems. Availability is one thing – with 99.99% translating to downtime of just under 9 seconds per 24 hours, or one in every 1,000 requests failing. Another aspect is the likelihood of a system or component performing its intended role without failure under certain conditions, with high dependability in this sense directly translating into cost-effectiveness and overall business performance.

The UK government's engineering hub outlines a set of criteria that goes into determining dependability for service level agreements (SLAs), with recommendations that services must be able to tolerate load, stress, and be thoroughly soak tested – measuring performance over varying conditions (within the bounds of normal usage) over a period of days.

Regardless, an enterprise's IT infrastructure should be able to not only withstand the pressures of day-to-day activity but also adapt and scale for the future. With the enterprise storage market set to surge by $11.6 billion by 2028, according to Technavio, it reflects a desire for easy-to-use management systems, flexible deployments, infrastructure scalability, and rising data volumes. That's why the ideal system removes complexity, allows the most demanding workloads to run, consolidates infrastructure, and helps businesses look for efficiencies. That's where systems like Dell's suite of enterprise infrastructure solutions can help. Desired elements should include future-proofing private cloud, unleashing AI at scale, strengthening cyber resilience, and powering AIOps.

McLaren Racing is a good example of a business that is harnessing the power of data to drive performance gains on the racetrack. Huge volumes of data gathered by in-car sensors can be quickly turned into valuable insight and, ultimately, speed.

“Dell AI Factory helps unlock performance - shaving lap time, accelerating development, and enabling progress we couldn’t achieve otherwise,” said Andrew McHutchon, Head of Data Science, McLaren Formula 1^® Team.

To explore how Dell enterprise solutions stand out in performance, efficiency, and usability compared to the wider market, download Prowess Consulting's white paper, 'Maximize Performance, Efficiency, and Usability for Enterprise Storage'.