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Converged infrastructures—where servers, storage, networks, applications and management all converged into a single entity—make it possible to turn IT into a service provider rather than a cost center. While making the transition requires several technology considerations, businesses also need to change their mindset, which is another major transition.

Here are five tips for creating an environment that helps your business buy into the converged infrastructure concept:

  1. Define A Realistic Process: There needs to be a realistic process that enables IT to transform the company’s current heterogeneous, often haphazard IT environment into a well-mannered converged infrastructure—as time and budget will actually allow.
  1. Give Change a Chance: Don’t be sold on moving the enterprise to a new infrastructure architecture without fully understanding the risks and the rewards.
  1. Break Down the Walls: Before linking the company’s infrastructure together, IT has to break through system silos from the top down. Get the entire organization to understand the benefits of the “shared use” model.
  1. Don’t Let the Company’s Legacy Become Its Legacy: The time to address legacy systems and establish realistic milestones to replace them is now, before they cause problems.
  1. Time to Take Out the Trash: Show the business how migration day is a great way to get rid of those things that just seem to be taking up space—the old hardware, apps and data that no longer serve a purpose.

Once you decide to convert to a converged infrastructure, make the change like you mean it! Businesses today are interested in agility—the ability to respond rapidly and cost efficiently to changes in the business environment.

In many ways, agility is the business counterpart to a converged infrastructure; both have the feel of controlled chaos. The policies and procedures for a converged infrastructure must ensure that purposeful, constant, controlled change—not chaos—becomes the status quo.

Want to know more about converged infrastructures? See the solutions that Logicalis offers at http://www.us.logicalis.com/solutions-and-services/converged-infrastructure/manage/