Meet digital transformation challenges by scaling IT systems

Digital transformation, with its new paradigms, presents challenges to your enterprise. New business models are pressuring organizations to rapidly innovate and respond. Success in this environment requires an enterprise IT ecosystem that’s scalable and agile – able to swiftly accommodate growing and shifting business needs.

As an IT or operations executive, you constantly face the challenge of scaling enterprise systems. To succeed in the new digital world, you must quickly meet growing and fluctuating resource demands while remaining efficient, cost-effective and secure. You may also aim to simplify IT infrastructure so that you can become more agile while breaking down traditional structures within your organization.

Here are three ways to accomplish these goals:

1. Know when to scale up instead of out

Fortunately, there’s often a simpler and more efficient solution. IBM studies have found that once many workloads reach a certain usage threshold, it can be more cost efficient to scale up instead of out. The scale-up approach adds computing resources within systems rather than across systems, enabling faster communication and more effective data sharing. By consolidating your sprawling x86 architecture into a single or handful of scale-up servers, you can reduce total cost of ownership, simplify operations, applications and databases and free up valuable data center space. A mix of virtual scale-up and scale-out capabilities will enable your workloads to flexibly respond to business demand.

IBM studies have also found, and clients who have embraced these studies have noted, that moving from a scale-out to a scale-up architecture can save enterprises up to 50 percent on server costs over three years.[ii] As your system needs continue to grow, a scale-up enterprise server will expand with them while running at extremely high utilization rates and meeting all service-level agreements. Eventually a scale-up server will need to scale out too, but not before providing ample extra capacity for growth.

2. Encrypt at scale

If your enterprise is like most, running x86 architectures with limited resources, computing power and budget, you may be forced to settle for only selectively encrypting data. This form of encryption typically burdens applications, adding significant complexity and risk while taxing valuable developer resources. An enterprise computing platform leverages ultra-fast crypto co-processor technology to encrypt all data while using minimal processing capacity and negligibly impacting service-level agreements. This encompassing encryption is handled at a system level, reducing application complexity while freeing up developer resources to focus on business outcomes.

3. Meet scale demands with agile enterprise computing

Techcombank, a leading bank in Vietnam, has moved from a distributed x86 architecture to an enterprise computing platform to meet scalability needs. As the Vietnamese banking industry grows rapidly, Techcombank is growing with it – by adding 30 percent more customers and 70 percent more online traffic annually[vi]. To support this growth, Techcombank migrated its applications to an enterprise computing platform. The platform enables Techcombank to scale as demand grows while experiencing enhanced performance, reliability and security.

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Scalability, agility and enterprise computing aren’t just benefits for today’s enterprises – they’re requirements. The tips above will help you to be smart about systems scalability to drive success in today’s fast-moving business environment.