“If you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more.” Those words of wisdom from retired US Army General Eric Shinseki highlight the stark reality of life for the modern business. Organizations ignore the need to change, adapt and innovate at their peril. Household names like Blockbuster, Toys “R” Us or Kodak might easily spring to mind as examples of companies that made headlines for all the wrong reasons. Each of them failed to change and then they just failed.

The truth is the new digital economy is profoundly changing the world around us. Business survival now depends on our ability to change faster than the competition and fast enough to satisfy our customers’ new demands.

That leaves organizations of all types looking for a new paradigm to drive innovation and to help transform their IT strategy.

What do business leaders believe are the secrets to successful IT transformation? A global research study by SUSE shows DevOps, containers and SDI are high on the agenda*.

Breaking down barriers with DevOps

DevOps is all about getting things done faster and more efficiently. It aims to break down the barriers that have traditionally existed between the Development and Operations teams. The intention is to speed up software development cycles, making it possible to deploy software into production faster, more often and more reliably.

According to SUSE’s research, three-quarters of enterprises are planning to embrace DevOps for application development.

Containers are gaining momentum fast

Containers are a way of taking virtualization to the next level of efficiency. They are self-contained and isolated environments that contain everything the code enclosed within them needs to run independently. Without the need of a hypervisor or fully embedded OS, they are far simpler than VMs and extremely lightweight in terms of resources. This makes them fast and simple to spin up, dynamically scalable, consistent and predictable.

With a quarter of all organizations using applications containers already, SUSE’s research calls out that 44 percent will be using them within the next 12 months.

Containers are seen as a way to modernize legacy workloads and speed up the development of new cloud-native applications that need to be portable, scalable and agile.

SDI is the future of the data center

Data centers have traditionally been built using hardware architectures that are too rigid and slow to respond to the needs of modern dynamic applications.

By contrast, a Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI), transforms your data center into a private cloud platform. Advanced functionality and automation delivered by software rather than expensive proprietary hardware. Compute, networking and storage capacity are provided in dynamic, easy to use pools of resources that are quickly deployed and easily managed based on the needs of the workloads or users.

SUSE’s research reveals 95 percent of organizations believe SDI is the future for their data center.

Three secrets to IT transformation revealed

Knowing what IT leaders believe is strategically important to their IT transformation efforts is valuable. But successfully delivering that transformation is a tough ask. If it was easy, everyone would have it done already.

To dig a little deeper and get an insight into three critical factors for successfully delivering IT transformation in your business, check out our latest white paper on the “Three Secrets to IT Transformation – DevOps, Containers and SDI”.

* Source: SDI, Containers and DevOps – Cloud Adoption Trends Driving IT Transformation