FAST IT:

Accelerating Innovation
in the Internet of Everything Era

PRESENTED BY

Today's IT organization is challenged as never before. Operational costs are rising as budgets fall. Pervasive mobility and an explosion in connected devices are supercharging complexity. Business users are bypassing IT to access cloud-based services.

IT must execute a step change in operating efficiency (costs), business enablement (agility), and security. The IT organization itself must become both a source and a facilitator of disruptive innovation. This requires a new model for IT, which we call Fast IT.

By implementing Fast IT, IT can potentially capture a 20 to 25 percent reduction in costs. These savings can be redeployed to address new capabilities and free IT to innovate and become a trusted partner with the lines of business to drive outcomes.

The Internet of Everything

The Internet’s next wave of change is the Internet of Everything (IoE). IoE represents the explosion of connectivity among people, processes, data and things — which could surge from some 13 billion today to more than 50 billion in 2020.

IoE and the notion of “connecting the unconnected” present staggering economic opportunities.Cisco projects the total IoE-related Value at Stake over the next 10 years to be $19 trillion. The ability to harness the digitization that makes up IoE — cloud, mobility, social media, analytics, security, the Internet of Things (IoT) — will determine the winners and losers of the next decade.

The Need for Speed

The IoE era requires a different IT operating model - a model that increases service velocity, reduces overall complexity, and makes IT operations more intelligent and secure. It requires a model that allows a CIO to drive business transformation in a fast-moving landscape. Fast IT provides a unifying framework to integrate major technology transitions - cloud, mobility, SDN, security, data analytics. It melds a crucial capability with the organizational changes needed to meet the accelerating demands of every line of business - sales, marketing, HR, finance, and R&D.

IoE is Supercharging IT Complexity

IoE represents the convergence of multiple technology transitions. These create new opportunities, but also reveal new challenges. While there has always been a high level of complexity in IT, IoE is supercharging that complexity. We see this as business users bypass IT for BYOD, along with third-party services and applications (X as a service, BYOX), as part of the broader phenomenon of consumerization. 80 percent of survey respondents see IoE as a "significant" or "very significant" challenge for their organizations.

Apps Are the Oxygen of the Business (but Can Smother IT)

The proliferation, criticality, and interdependence of applications are all dramatically increasing.Recent figures project app downloads will reach 138 billion worldwide in 2014 alone.* Applications are no longer fixed and premise-based. Now they are in the mobile cloud, and they need to be secure and accessible from anywhere, on any device. These factors are combining to intensify the complexity of IT in the IoE era.

Lines of Business Take IT into Their Own Hands

Nearly half (46 percent) of total IT spending now occurs outside the confines of the "corporate IT" organization. Respondents know that so-called "shadow IT" expenditures - that portion of the 46 percent that occurs beyond the eyes of the IT organization - arise, in part, when the IT function does not meet business needs or deploy solutions fast enough, which they cited as the top drivers of shadow IT spending in the LoBs. But shadow IT is coming out of the shadows because users are not getting the business solutions they need from IT, or the experiences they prefer, in the time frame that makes the capability valuable.

Service Orchestration Has Been CIOs' 'White Whale'

In 2013, Cisco, in partnership with Intel, conducted a survey of IT leaders on the impacts of cloud on the IT consumption lifecycle. Respondents* registered a clear consensus (76 percent) in the belief that IT organizations were evolving to be brtokers, or "orchestrators," of services, applications, experiences, and new capabilities on behalf of the business. A year on, we asked respondents the same question.Today, the percentage that "somewhat" or "strongly" agrees stands at 90 percent.

Fast IT is the Way Forward

Technology changes can support the evolution of the IT/LoB partnership in pivotal ways.A full 90 percent of respondents agree that "agile" IT infrastructure models (defined for respondents as comprising key Fast IT concepts such as automation and programmability) are the way of the future. Fifty-seven percent of respondents also saw an agile IT infrastructure model as "very important" to their organization's future. Another 37 percent called it "somewhat important."

A 'Fabric of Clouds' Provides the Platform for Change

The dominant model moving forward will be based on hybrid-cloud infrastructures, in effect a "fabric of clouds." This will include on-premise and off-premise, bare metal and hosted virtualization, private cloud combined with public cloud, with workloads and infrastructure tasks shifting as business (application) conditions warrant. Private cloud and public cloud, for example, each have their own economic, operational, and strategic appeal, and the best IT organizations will focus on capturing maximum value from both, leveraging an ecosystem of diverse cloud capabilities and service delivery partners.

Intelligence 'at the Edge' Enables the Real - Time Business

All of those devices and sensors connected via the mobile cloud will be generating torrents of data. Which brings us to another key element of Fast IT - analytics.

Firms must leverage data when and where it is needed. The enterprise data warehouse has its place in IT strategy; but in today's environment, the "single source of truth" restricts IT organizations in driving innovation with deep business impacts. This is particularly true concerning their ability to leverage Big Data.

The Security Perimeter is Expanding

With the spread of new connected devices and the growing sophistication of attacks, these two strategies are less and less tenable. Best-of-breed solutions can no longer stand alone. And with so many devices, so many connections, and so much widely distributed information, there is no security perimeter.With Fast IT, security evolves to a more platform-driven approach in which all infrastructure domains, devices, applications, and services are comingled and integrated through application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable greater intelligence, automation, and efficacy of threat detection. A policy-driven, agile IT infrastructure can detect and quarantine cyberattacks before they can inflict grave harm - what we call automated threat detection.

IT Can't Afford To Be Seen as the 'Department of No'

IoE is not just about data and things. It is also about people and process. And Fast IT enables transformation in all aspects of the IT function. IT organizations cannot profit fully from infrastructure change without effecting some necessary modifications to how the organization itself is run. Several of our IT industry luminaries identified culture and leadership as the most critical components of this change. They conceive of IT transformation as a journey, rather than a single-stage evolution, and view this challenge through the lens of change management.

Capturing the 'IoE Dividend'

IT and the vendor community have already lowered total cost of ownership (TCO) from historic levels. In recent years, a big part of TCO improvements has come via automation, outsourcing, and virtualization. Software-defined networking (SDN) is emerging as another area of potential gains, although technology maturity, standards, security, and overall understanding have acted as brakes on this. Now, another wave of TCO improvements is at hand.Cisco estimates a 20 to 25 percent improvement in IT costs as a result of Fast IT. These savings - what we call the "IoE dividend" - can be redeployed to address new business capabilities.

Fast IT in the Internet of Everything

IoE presents enormous opportunities to companies that innovate quickly. The IT organization has never been more integral to the company's future, because innovating at the speed required by IoE depends upon IT's ability to deliver capabilities that can be deployed, scaled, and customized instantly.

By simplifying the IT environment and unshackling IT from its current burdens, Fast IT converts disruption from a challenge to a strategic advantage.

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For more information on Fast IT, please visit

http://www.cisco.com/go/futureofit