The powerful impact of purposeful acceleration

Digital transformation sits firmly at the top of every businesses agenda. But the balancing act of delivering new, futureproofed, and competitive solutions, while keeping a dynamic and complex IT environment running smoothly, is enough to freeze any CIO in place. Whether they are under pressure to innovate, deliver new functions at speed, improve user experiences, streamline operations, or all of the above, the bright promise of new, shiny tech is often tarnished by fears of "what if?". What if it causes disruption to day-to-day operations? Brings too much complexity? Under delivers ROI? Not to mention the heavy investment and efforts required for rolling it out.

Will it pay off? Or will it leave you mourning for your old systems, even though you know they won't stand the test of time?

The blue-sky thinking has to account for down-to-earth practicalities - and this is the predicament. You need to modernise to grow and futureproof the business, but equally you need to stay afloat right now. In other words, run and transform at the same time.

But you can have your cake and eat it. It comes down to having the right strategy and plan. Modernising according to the business's priorities and needs, maximising the benefits new technology brings, while levelling up existing real-estate to minimise waste.

What are the core pillars to this approach? Micro Focus's Run and Transform process splits this out across four areas: application delivery, cyber resilience, simplified transformation, and actionable analytics.

1. Accelerating application delivery

When the landscape is rapidly evolving and competitors threaten to outpace you at a moment's notice, it's critical to move fast and deliver greater application value than ever before. So how can you bring innovation to life at the speed the business demands? Reliably scaling Agile and DevOps practices across all environments from mainframe to cloud and all points in between will allow you to make your software smarter and more efficient. As you progress on your modernisation journey, you can continue to test to ensure developments support the business's goals while keeping project timelines at the absolute minimum.

2. Strengthening cyber resilience

Cyber-attacks are an ever present threat. They're no longer a question of ‘if' or even ‘when', but ‘how many times?' The conversation has moved on from defending against attacks, to ensuring your organisation is resilient enough to weather the many assaults headed its way. Cyber resilience therefore must be continuously evolved using security analytics for hybrid environments. This ‘never-finished' perspective affords the safest protection - empowering businesses to detect risks, respond to them and recover on an ongoing basis.

3. Simplifying IT transformation

The Run and Transform approach can also be harnessed to manage the complexity of IT operations. This is made possible through a Digital Factory - where Micro Focus integrates or replaces incompatible tools from the heritage environment into a unified platform. Creating a centre of IT excellence, this harmonises traditional and cloud services, frees resources and takes the headache away from accelerating transformation.

4. Analysing data in time to act

Vast volumes of varied data make it difficult to understand how to act on insights, let alone act on them in a timely and meaningful manner. However, by leveraging advanced analytics and machine learning with unified analytics, organisations don't have to have data all in one place. These services enable them to turn dispersed data into accurate, actionable and automated insights without a complete upheaval process.

Jaguar TCS Racing is currently reaping the rewards of this approach. Micro Focus enabled its Formula E team to leverage critical data for real-time analytics and machine learning - enhancing both team performance and the fan viewing experience. By analysing video and speech data from publicly accessible media transmission, they were able to run with resilience today while transforming to push the boundaries of competition, innovation and customer experience tomorrow.

Unstoppable modernisation

Once your business has mastered the principles of all four areas? You're braced for change, ready to achieve a faster return on investment, and disruption is no longer a cause to keep you awake at night. In essence, you're purposefully accelerating by intelligently building on past investments to secure a stronger tomorrow.

For those businesses who embrace the dual requirements of current and future IT provisioning, choosing a single vendor with multiple solutions and the means to provide support throughout the ongoing journey will stand them in good stead. Micro Focus is uniquely placed to help customers run and transform, offering proven and broad set of services for non-stop innovation.