Dynamic Infrastructure – Delivering results today while
investing for tomorrow

Need for a holistic approach

Even in the face of global uncertainty, it is the infrastructure that continues to enable commerce and communications – the roads, networks, utilities, and technologies connecting and differentiating organizations, competitors and customers. The need therefore, is for a new type of infrastructure that:
  • Enables visibility, control and automation across all business and IT assets
  • Is highly optimized to achieve more with less
  • Addresses the information challenge
  • Leverages flexible sourcing like clouds
  • Manages and mitigates risks
 Organizations need an infrastructure that can propel them forward - not hold them back. Until now, many organizations have thought of physical infrastructure and IT infrastructure as separate. This meant, for example, that airports, roadways, buildings, power plants, and oil wells were managed in one way, while datacenters, PCs, cell phones, routers, and broadband devices were managed quite differently.

To succeed in today's world of instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent assets, a new approach is needed. Now, the infrastructure of atoms and the infrastructure of bits are merging into an intelligent, global, dynamic infrastructure. This convergence of business and IT assets requires an infrastructure that can measure and manage the lifecycle of assets that exist beyond the data center, throughout an organization's entire facilities as well as between one organization and another. The range of this approach is broader than ever before, and its effect on organizations is equally far-reaching.

Benefits of having a dynamic infrastructure

A dynamic infrastructure takes advantage of the intelligence gained across the network. By design, a dynamic infrastructure is service-oriented and focused on supporting and enabling the end users in a highly responsive way. It can utilize alternative sourcing approaches, like cloud computing to deliver new services with agility and speed.

Global organizations already have the foundation for a dynamic infrastructure that will bring together the business and IT infrastructure to create new possibilities. For example:
  • Transportation companies can optimize their vehicles' routes leveraging GPS and traffic information.
  • Facilities organizations can secure access to locations and track the movement of assets by leveraging RFID technology.
  • Production environments can monitor and manage presses, valves and assembly equipment through embedded electronics.
  • Technology systems can be optimized for energy efficiency, managing spikes in demand, and ensuring disaster recovery readiness.
  • Communications companies can better monitor usage by location, user or function, and optimize routing to enhance user experience.
  • Utility companies can reduce energy usage with a "smart grid."
With a dynamic infrastructure, companies can:
  • Improve Service – Not only can a dynamic infrastructure help ensure high availability and quality of existing services, but it can also meet customer expectations for real-time, dynamic access to innovative new services.
  • Reduce Cost – A dynamic infrastructure can help contain operational cost and complexity, and help achieve breakthrough productivity gains through virtualization, optimization, energy stewardship and flexible sourcing.
  • Manage Risk Through a dynamic infrastructure, organizations can address today's security, resiliency and compliance challenges, and also prepare for the new risks posed by an even more connected and collaborative world. Dependency on business systems has increased, with business costs of downtime escalating across all industries.
Virtualized applications can reduce the cost of testing, packaging and supporting an application by 60%, and they reduced overall TCO by 5% to 7% in our model.
– Source: Gartner – "TCO of Traditional Software Distribution vs. Application Virtualization" / Michael A Silver, Terrence Cosgrove, Mark A Margevicious, Brian Gammage / 16 April 2008

While green issues are a primary driver in 10% of current data center outsourcing and hosting initiatives, cost reductions initiatives are a driver 47% of the time and are now aligned well with green goals. Combining the two means that at least 57% of data center outsourcing and hosting initiatives are driven by green.
– Source: Gartner – "Green IT Services as a Catalyst for Cost Optimization." / Kurt Potter / 4 December 2008

"By 2013, more than 50% of midsize organizations and more than 75% of large enterprises will implement layered recovery architectures."
– Source: Gartner – "Predicts 2009: Business Continuity Management Juggles Standardization, Cost and Outsourcing Risk"). / Roberta J Witty, John P Morency, Dave Russell, Donna Scott, Rober Desisto / 28 January 2009


The key to a business and IT infrastructure that is "dynamic" is leveraging technologies, service delivery and acquisition models that optimize the infrastructure for efficiency and flexibility while transforming management to an automated service delivery and management model.

Source: IBM
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