Improving speed and agility has become an imperative for IT leaders—especially given recent economic shifts, tightening budgets, geopolitical turmoil, supply chain issues and security worries. In fact, top CIOs and IT leaders surveyed by CIO Journal indicated that because they’ve had to adapt so quickly and often to meet their goals, speed and agility are among their top priorities in 2023.[1]
Increased business agility positions you to retain customers, jump on new business opportunities and recover more quickly in the event of an outage—all of which drive greater revenue and competitive advantage. On the flip side, a lack of agility can lead to dissatisfied customers, missed opportunities and poor resilience.
Is your IT department flexible enough to respond quickly when business priorities shift and your IT needs change? Or is limited agility your IT Achilles heel?
In the latest Equinix Global Tech Trends Survey (GTTS), 58% of digital leaders identified “not being fast enough in digital transformation” as a threat to their business success. The good news is that technology can increase your speed and flexibility, and offers significant cost and performance advantages—freeing you up to focus on strategic priorities. Digital infrastructure and services—as well as emerging technologies like analytics, AI and automation—make it easier for companies to deploy new solutions faster, increasing their agility whenever circumstances unexpectedly change. Fifty-six percent of digital leaders surveyed in the GTTS who are moving toward an Everything as a Service (XaaS) model cite its flexibility as a key aspect of its appeal.
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Digital transformation drives greater agility
Continuing your digital transformation is one of the most fundamental ways to solve for agility and future-proof your business. The digital journey is a bit different for every company, but it usually includes a mix of hybrid multicloud infrastructure, edge computing, a modernized network, virtual infrastructure and as-a-service solutions. Some companies pursue these technologies in parallel, and others start small and learn along the way.
Wherever your business happens to be at this moment, moving forward on your digital transformation journey will help you increase speed and agility and adjust more easily to changing requirements and new opportunities. For global enterprises, greater agility necessitates deploying infrastructure in more locations—cloud adjacent, close to where your facilities, data and users are. Distributed architectures help you reduce latency and create a better user experience. And digital infrastructure solutions enable faster deployments in new locations and easier connectivity between locations.
Agility and digital transformation function like a positive feedback loop. The more agile you are, the more easily your company digitally transforms; the further you progress on your digital transformation, the more agile you become.
How digital infrastructure and services boost flexibility
The last 3 years have reminded the IT industry how critical it is to be prepared for the unexpected. When demand for infrastructure resources suddenly changes due to a business opportunity, an acquisition or divestiture, a global event or a shift in the economy, your IT flexibility gets put to the test. Physical hardware can be challenging to scale up or down quickly. But virtual solutions greatly accelerate time to market. A physical infrastructure deployment that takes months can be achieved in just days with digital services.
Agility hinges on your ability to deploy infrastructure at the right times, in the right places. As infrastructure increasingly moves to the edge and relies on interconnected partner ecosystems, digital services are becoming essential to optimizing IT.
The business and economic benefits of Equinix Digital Services
Equinix Digital Services—including Equinix Fabric® software-defined interconnection, Network Edge virtual network devices and Equinix Metal® automated bare metal servers and storage appliances—improve your business agility by enabling you to adopt virtual infrastructure quickly and easily, on demand. With Equinix Digital Services, you can go to market faster and connect to a robust ecosystem of cloud and technology service providers to accelerate innovation.
According to the commissioned Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) of Equinix Digital Services study by Forrester Consulting, a composite organization comprised of interviewees with experience using Equinix Digital Services spun up new infrastructure and interconnections to key partners 10 times more quickly than with the previous solution. Not only that, but Equinix Digital Services reduce costs and deliver a high return on investment (ROI). The composite organization saw a 142% ROI using digital infrastructure and interconnection services on Platform Equinix®. Here’s a glimpse at some of the specific cost advantages seen by the composite organization in the TEI study:
- 60% lower infrastructure management costs over a 3-year period
- 30% lower connectivity costs over a 3-year period
- 25% reduction in incremental infrastructure purchases
- 80% reduction in operational downtime, driving $5 million in annual savings
Those cost advantages translate into greater flexibility to use your resources to address new strategic priorities or pivot when the circumstances change.
Read the Forrester TEI study to learn more about the benefits realized by Equinix customers.
If you want to learn more about how you can accelerate the pace of innovation with Equinix Digital Services, check out our webinar with Forrester in your region:
[1] Bella Lin, CIO 2023 Priorities: Speed and Agility, CIO Journal, The Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2022.
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