Business infrastructure is constantly evolving – in the last two decades alone, the backup industry has experienced major changes – from mainframe to distribution, distribution to cloud, and cloud to Kubernetes.

But making an upgrade in tech is not simply a financial investment, it is a daunting prospect, known by customers as ‘pain of change’ – the effort required to move from one set of systems to another.

Typically, business leaders and department managers believe that holding onto their legacy solutions that operate reasonably well is a valid option. The belief is that they save valuable time and budget on new tech, with no repercussions. However, inertia and failing to create change could be the biggest risk they end up taking.

The challenges around upgrading tech

Innovation is the future.

While change shouldn’t be taken lightly and is often a scary prospect for even the most experienced executive, it’s what enables businesses to grow, improve, and evolve to stay relevant and competitive in the market landscape.

Adopting new technology is the main way organisations can steal a march on their competitors, and the pandemic accelerated the deployment of certain technologies to enable remote working for employees to adapt to this new approach.

Business continuity became critical for all business models, which meant finding ways to invest in solutions that could tread water and keep the business going, rather than prepare for the future.

IT pros are now finding that their systems are disparate as they hold back from withdrawing their legacy technology, and instead attempt to minimally patch up systems wherever possible to eke out their use.

There’s also a perpetual stream of new and evolving cyber threats for businesses to cope with, that could cause short-term operational paralysis or even worse. UK ransomware attacks surged 233% in 2021 alone.

Technology leaders realise they must improve their security posture and invest in cybersecurity strategies to protect from breaches that might impact their systems and data, with a recovery strategy should a breach be successful.

Dispelling myths of change for a positive approach

Whilst staying still with existing technology poses a risk, a rip-and-replace tech strategy can be equally as challenging.

If a business deploys the same processes on a different technology, there may be initial cost savings and a boost in end user experience, but the benefits of new and proven innovative technologies that transform business capabilities are needed for the long-term, to compete with and outperform competitors.

In actively swerving the pain of upgrading technology, further challenges may beckon for business leaders:

• Holding back organisational agility – Avoiding the effort involved in managing a tech transition may in fact be the only upside of deferring or delaying an upgrade. Staying in first gear, without existing data-driven technology that can grow and scale with the company, your business agility will be limited, holding back development of new capabilities and success. It also means being unable to take advantage of new and proven technologies, either through the current vendor or elsewhere.
• Lack of competitive advantage – Deploying new technology typically involves investment, training, and a nominal hit in terms of downtime. But in a state of sheer inertia, businesses risk losing their competitive advantage and operational and cost efficiencies. Implementing the right innovative technologies can propel businesses to evolve to deliver more relevant and beneficial services for their customers – including AI, VR, and SaaS technologies to name a few of the industry’s biggest on the market.

Key considerations for a successful upgrade

Upgrading infrastructure is simply part of a business’ journey – with the pace of today’s technology evolution, it’s part of any regular business growth strategy to add or change vendors within the solutions portfolio. It’s vital to ensure existing technologies are innovative and that they clearly align to today’s and tomorrow’s business needs.

Time will be a key factor in making changes, but if business leaders decide to merely ‘lift and shift’ or restructure their applications and data, without fully enhancing their systems, the benefits will be limited. Making the right changes in one fell swoop incurs a shorter, more manageable period of disruption, while achieving the optimum outcome.

Finding the right vendor partnership is also critical to upgrade success. A vendor that understands the business’ objectives and the culture of the business will work most effectively to understand the current challenges and pain points to overcome, and know what success looks like. Technology is a facility, not a goal. Vendors should support their customers with technology to achieve their business goals.

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Key criteria for choosing a vendor should include their prior experience of working with similar types of businesses and capability breadth and depth. Every transition plan should be tailored to each specific business in its particular industry. Each stage of design, control, implementation, and post-implementation support should give confidence in the outcome.

Consolidation and confidence make a smooth tech transition

Consolidating the number of technologies in use, and bringing it all within a secure, regulated, and controlled platform ideally positions the technology estate for change.

This makes it easy to integrate with new tech tools, such as security or automation. Working with credible industry leaders offers a major advantage in de-risking projects, timelines, costs, and outcomes. Also likely reducing the time to value is a major objective.

Creating true change will always have an impact on the business, therefore maintaining a focus on the desired outcome is vital. A vendor that has a vision as well as tactical tech knowhow and clear and measurable objectives will help the business change up the gears to cruising, while being able to make more intelligent business decisions for the increasingly digital future.