Business leaders want IT to deliver fast solutions and be a true partner. However, if IT cannot provide what the business needs or give a viable alternative, business units will purchase solutions externally. The document outlines how IT can drive innovation through a software-defined, cloud-based approach. This allows separating applications from infrastructure, simplifying management, enabling automation, and providing choice in deployment location. Adopting cloud economics in this way can free up budget for IT to invest in innovation that drives business growth.

1. 4 Ways
IT Can Drive
Innovation
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2. Disruption rules.
Today, every industry is experiencing disruption at some level.
Business leaders must keep pace — often looking to the CIO and IT
organization to bring technical innovations to the table.

3. Business leaders want fast solutions
and true partnership. If your team
can’t deliver, they’ll build it themselves
or buy it externally.
Business Wants:
Speed and Partnership

4. “More than 25 percent of overall IT spend
is controlled by or managed outside the IT
organization for 19 percent of CIOs surveyed.”
— Harvey Nash CIO Survey 2015

5. If IT can’t provide what the business wants
or give an equally viable option, the business
will purchase solutions externally.
Business Wants:
Choice

6. Business users expect technology to stay out
of the way of work. They want to pick up
a device to get to their data — easily
and securely.
Business Wants:
Simplicity + Security

7. Exceedingly complex systems have put CIOs
in a bind. Chief Information Officer is
sometimes equated to Chief Infrastructure
Officer. You know you need to deliver
on consumer-like experiences that
will make the business flow.
How do you do it?
From Infrastructure
to Innovation
Become
the Chief
Innovation
Officer.

8. It’s the Cloud Economy.
You can clear the way to innovation
with a software-defined approach, or cloud economics.
Realize its benefits in four key ways.

9. Separating applications from the underlying
infrastructure (compute, storage, and
networking) lets you keep the entire
network-distributed application together
in a segment. As a result, you can
move and deploy it without
having to tinker with its internal
configuration from a
networking perspective.
Cloud Economics:
Virtualization

10. With applications in virtual segments —
whether that segment is a virtual machine,
a virtual network, or a virtual storage
type — you radically simplify the number
of different types of things that must
be managed in your data center.
Cloud Economics:
Simplified Management

11. Instead of needing to automate the life of 3, 4,
or 5,000 different applications, you need
to automate the lifecycle of only a few
segment types. And by automating the
lifecycle of an individual segment,
you can automate the lifecycle of
all the applications you put into
that segment.
Cloud Economics:
Automation

12. Once the application — and all that goes with
it — is separate from the infrastructure, you
can choose to run it in the cloud. That cloud
doesn’t have to be a private cloud or a
public cloud. You can deploy a hybrid
cloud for flexibility and manage it
as a single, unified cloud, using
the same people, processes,
and tool sets.
Cloud Economics:
Choice

13. Why software-defined?
The simplification realized by the software-defined approach gets you
closer to what you want IT to be: self-service, instantly provisioned,
pay per use, elastic, and cost-efficient. It also frees up IT budget to be
redirected to innovation that will drive your businesses’ top-line growth.

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