User:Hsin0247/IT Consolidation

IT Consolidation consists of a set of processes that aim to reduce server and IT costs of a business organisation, it also aims to increase employee productivity as they are provided with improved versions of hardware and software solutions. IT consolidation aims to ease the tactical, operational and strategic operations of a business organisation.

Legacy System
Since the establishment of the world wide web in 1989 the biggest problem individuals faced in the field of information technology was storing, retrieving and retaining data that was collected from individual users while they were using a particular software or hardware application; Storing of such data took place in privately help hardware devices that were costly to set-up and maintain; not only that, technological implementations were getting outdated within couple years of installation, that forced  organisations to spend more of their financial resources to keep up with the external technological trends in order to increase employee productivity and minimize long-term costs. A lot of business organisations realised that the overall IT budget can be optimised if all the firms start using shared datacentres which can be operated and controlled using SaaS solutions, since then a lot of public and private organisations aim to migrate or have already migrated their datacentres to the cloud which provides them with the ability to analyse user data and improve user experience for their potential users, customers or clients.

Why IT consolidation
Information Technology has been growing at an exponential rate since the late 1990s. Companies established then tend to have problems and budget issues due to the shift and adaption of several different software across their offices and employees tend to face a decrease in productivity due to different IT environments within the same organisation. Moreover, all the IT business organisations established then had to set up and handle their own hardware systems that were connected to the world wide web and upgrading hardware due to change in external technologies would cost these business organisations a fortune until the concepts of ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) came along which changed the way individual and organisations shared and stored data on the internet; SaaS solutions like Microsoft’s Azure, Amazon AWS, Alibaba Cloud and a countless more cloud vendors are now catering and assisting business organisations of datacentres that have no physical relation to individual or organisations this leads to a massive cut in hardware cost and reduction in office spaces of IT companies as they consolidate to shared data canters; this in fact has a massive effect on the waste generated by IT companies. With a bird’s eye perspective consolidating can help a business organisation in three ways:

Tactical Benefits
Tactical benefits include but are not limited to a massive reduction in IT operating cost of an organisation. Moreover, streamlining the process of operations in an organisation by establishing software and hardware standards, consolidation aims to reduce IT licensing costs, provides more control over the servers, networks and workstations. Aims to increase communication and employee productivity and according to this news article organizations who successfully consolidate there IT infrastructure save up to 25% on operational and variable costs.

Operation Benefits
An effective consolidation process provides ample amount of operational benefits to a business organisation, premium software services like Slack, Trello, Skype for Business aims to automate the remote meeting scheduling process that increases productivity of employees by 3-7%. Improved internal IT infrastructure also eases the onboarding process and training of new employees as the organisation is in a complete sync with the latest technological architecture that recent university graduates operate and empathise with.

Strategic Benefits
IT consolidation has a long term impact on an organisations consolidation process the idea of migrating physical datacentres to the shared cloud services eases the process of upgrading and downgrading system as per the user and company requirements moreover, future consolidation processes become much easier as one can control all aspects of an online business using software orientated solutions. This also impacts the amount of physical waste produced by an IT company that increases sustainability and has a positive impact on a company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) portfolio.

Characteristics of IT Consolidation
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Data disparity
According to the business predictions and new reports of late 2017 a lot of research experts stated that “data is the new oil”, wherein understanding and mining data became one of the most popular jobs on reputed job directories like indeed.com.au, seek.com.au and many more. IT consolidation process collectively stores data in a remote location and makes it easy for company representatives to manage, store, append, edit, update and analyse it. Since its all stored at one location data pruning and analysis becomes relatively easier which leads to faster software fixes and adheres to the concepts of DevOps, continuous delivery and improvement.

Branch Offices
All the government organisations in the US and other developed nations have considered and developed their own IT consolidation practices it surely benefits them a lot as all the datacentres are centralized and can be accessed from any branch that leads to a positive impact of response time of government officials. However, according to various news sources a lot of government representatives are against the idea of storing confidential data on a shared network wherein the overall security of the data can always be compromised.

Multiple new technologies
According to the core concept of IT consolidation the main aim is to