Moving away from the traditional CapEx model in which infrastructure is purchased outright and maintained, businesses are now moving to an As a Service IT approach that more easily meets their needs.
The As a Service delivery model allows businesses to control operational spend, scale seamlessly without the risk of overutilization, maintain flexibility, and simplify their IT approach. This approach is picking up tremendous momentum. Market research titan IDC notes, “By 2021, 75% of enterprises will recognize the benefits of as-a-service consumption, driving a 3X increase in demand for on-premises infrastructure delivered via flexible as-a-service solutions.”1
Challenges in the traditional IT model
The traditional IT model continues to be the culprit in limiting businesses as they look to operate in an agile manner. Managing disparate hybrid environments is wrought with complexity. Keeping outdated hardware resilient to modern cyberattacks is taxing. It’s no wonder IT teams are quickly finding themselves overstretched on resources and budget.
Our clients are dealing with several increasingly common pain points in the traditional cloud and storage models:
- Inflexible costs and high CapEx
- Inability to scale up or down quickly
- Legacy infrastructure hindering innovation
- Slower time to market and more downtime if using legacy technology
- Challenges aligning go-to-market offerings with the business for better outcomes
IDC research analysis around Cisco+ corroborates the conversations we’re having with our clients around these challenges:
"Mature enterprises continue to rely on traditional IT and dedicated on-premises infrastructure resources for mission-critical workloads. The operational complexity of these hybrid, interconnected environments is creating significant challenges when it comes to maintaining end-to-end business resiliency, security, application, and IT staff efficiency.
Traditional platform-specific management strategies can make it difficult to gain an actionable full-stack view to troubleshoot performance issues and create significant complexities when it comes to making decisions about on-premises versus public cloud workload deployment choices.”2
Ultimately, managing disparate IT platforms and owned components on-premises and in the cloud is turning out to be an unsustainable strategy for many organizations — which is where the As a Service model comes in.
4 key advantages of the As a Service model
Adopting consumption models for IT solutions provides four major advantages for teams prioritizing modernization:
- A consumption-based model — The upfront pricing model of As a Service delivery offers improved cost control. Clients pay online for what they use and have the option to scale up or down quickly as needed.
- A financial tool — The flexible OpEx terms allow clients to avoid FASB lease rules and removes the necessity for CapEx purchases, resulting in no assets on the books.
- A bridge to cloud strategy — Cloud resources are easily consumed without the worry of overutilization. Businesses can easily rebalance capacity across hybrid cloud as cloud strategy evolves.
- A way to reduce IT risk — By removing the costly CapEx model, businesses remove the risk of hardware outages or costly hardware failures.
Cisco+: An answer to the traditional IT model
Cisco+, delivered by Insight, is the industry’s first As a Service hybrid cloud solution. This offering from Cisco delivers an edge over other consumption-based offerings in the space today by building off Cisco’s wide range of IT solutions and mature portfolio of technology partners.
While other As a Service models operate as disparate technology solutions — leaving clients or technology partners to piece together a management strategy — Cisco+ builds on the success of Cisco’s longstanding partnership with Insight to offer a more robust As a Service offering comprising compute, storage, and networking in one cost-effective, manageable solution delivered through Insight.
Moving forward
Based on market research and consumer sentiment, the As a Service model is well positioned to become a staple of the approaching evolution in IT. Together with Cisco, Insight is poised to be a clear leader in this space as more businesses look for more strategic partners to help navigate transformation. If you’d like to learn more about Cisco+ delivered by Insight, read our ebook, “Pay-As-You-Go On-Premises IT Models.”
Sources:
1 IDC. (October 2020). IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Future of Digital Infrastructure 2021 Predictions.
2 IDC. (April 2021). Cisco Rolls Out as-a-Service Cloud Vision for Digital Infrastructure at Cisco Live. https://idcdocserv.com/lcUS47588521