Cloud technology is a springboard for digital transformation, delivering the business agility and simplicity that are so important to today’s business. Cloud is also a powerful catalyst for improving IT and user experiences, with operating principles such as anywhere access, policy automation, and visibility.

The benefits of cloud for the business, for IT operations, and for employee experiences are clear. But what if you could take the best principles of cloud and apply them across your entire IT infrastructure?

Simpler operations belong everywhere—not just the cloud

There’s no reason that the benefits of cloud need to be limited to the cloud. With the right strategy, platforms, and solutions, organizations can bring the cloud operating model to the network and across the entire cloud and network IT stack. In fact, in a recent IDC study, 60% of CIOs stated they are already planning to modify their operating model to manage value, agility, and risk by 2026.

Transitioning to this new operating model unlocks more benefits for IT leaders, in more environments and use cases. It simplifies operations for on-premises and cloud infrastructures, cutting down the complexity and fragmentation created by disconnected tools and consoles—and the different skill sets needed to work with them.

Expanding the cloud operating model also sets the stage for better collaboration between network, development, and cloud operations. By introducing a common model and language that transcends operational silos, this approach helps reduce points of friction between organizational handoffs.  The result: teams can collaborate and work together to solve problems more smoothly. Processes become more consistent, predictable, and less prone to manual errors.

Bringing the cloud operating model to the network helps your teams execute faster and be more agile. It can automate tasks such as deploying a new distributed application for users in the home and office. For example, with a cloud-managed SD-WAN, a company can establish connectivity and security in about an hour. With a traditional siloed approach, those same steps could take NetOps, DevOps, and SecOps teams days.

Once an application is up and running, the cloud operating model can support greater visibility into cloud and data center operations, application deployment, and performance. When you have improved end-to-end visibility, you can react more quickly. Your teams can troubleshoot faster, tune performance more easily, and enjoy a more intuitive experience as they do it.

When you simplify IT, better experiences and outcomes follow

What happens when the cloud operating model is brought to the network? Organizations gain the benefits of a simplified IT approach and better user experiences. But that’s not all. It also frees IT leaders to focus, innovate, and deliver better business outcomes.

Improving the application experience

Applying the cloud operating model expands visibility, creating an end-to-end view that enables more consistent governance across the infrastructure, from the network to the internet to the cloud, to help ensure a better application experience for every user.

Powering a more agile, proactive business

Making IT more agile ripples across the whole organization. By automating manual processes, you can get out in front of business changes, deploying resources to support new applications, so you can meet changing needs for business stakeholders, faster.

Controlling costs

Expanding a common operating model helps your teams work smarter with consistent management of the deployment, optimization, and troubleshooting lifecycles, both in the cloud and on-premises.

Breaking down silos for productivity

Cloud operating principles can enable consistent governance that helps bring down the barriers between siloed cloud and network teams—and help IT move beyond fragmented operations with different policies and processes.

Applying stronger security everywhere

Cloud consistency can also enhance security. With automation and improved end-to-end visibility, you can build security into every environment and make automated security updates an integral part of all lifecycle management.

Bring the best of the cloud across your infrastructure

There’s no “one size fits all” approach to a cloud operating model. It needs to be designed and tailored to align with each organization. With the right strategy, platforms, and services, you can take a big step toward simplifying IT to deliver unified experiences and improved business agility.

Discover how.

Digital Transformation

New collaboration-enhancing technologies are transforming three-dimensional (3D) design and accelerating content creation. The film industry used to require years of work from hundreds if not thousands of visual effects (VFX) artists to create a single 3D movie. In the case of 2009’s Avatar, over 900 VFX artists on separate design teams spent three years creating otherworldly flora, fauna, humans, aliens, and machines.

Though 3D design technologies have matured since then, many tools used by today’s design teams lack interoperability. Heavy 3D production pipelines are becoming increasingly complex as artists, designers, engineers, and researchers integrate technologies like global illumination, real-time ray tracing, AI, compute, and engineering simulation into their daily workflow. Compounding these challenges are a growing, diverse and increasingly remote or hybrid design workforce that must contend with arduous workflows and increasing expectations for physically-accurate, photoreal simulation.

Enter virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Specially developed VDI environments for 3D design enable authorized users secure from-anywhere access to a desktop environment containing the digital tools they need to do their jobs. The result is real-time collaboration across dispersed teams, more design iterations for higher quality work and faster production.

Enable Immersive Visualization and Accurate Simulation

VDI is built for speed, collaboration, and stringent security from cyberthreats from the data center to the endpoint. And it’s already revolutionizing 3D workflows across industries. Even before the pandemic and social distancing, the VDI market was growing. A recent study forecasts a blazing compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 20% between 2022 and 2030, when the global VDI market will be worth over $78 billion.

VDI connects design teams on a single, interactive platform fueled by powerful servers and virtualized GPUs. Teams can do their very best work in a shared virtual space integrated with leading design, animation, and visual effects software. Creators, designers, researchers, and engineers can work together from anywhere, on any device, without having to deal with importing and exporting massive files. 

Workflows are simplified as near-instantaneous updates, iterations, and changes with no need for data preparation.  With real-time application interoperability, infinite iterations are possible at no additional cost. Design teams are empowered to take creative risks to achieve new heights of quality and innovation with faster time-to-market.

VDI for 3D Design

It is no small task to provide access to high-performance compute power to a geographically distributed team in a way that enables collaboration without compromising security. But to remain competitive and retain top talent, organizations have no choice but to provide a virtual platform that enables designers and reviewers to work together in real-time across leading software applications in shared virtual 3D worlds from anywhere. 

Dell Technologies and NVIDIA are working together to deliver a powerful GPU-accelerated VDI solution that is available anywhere for collaborative immersive 3D design workflows. Dell Validated Design for VDI with NVIDIA Omniverse™ Enterprise fundamentally transforms complex design workflows for organizations of any size and 3D projects of any scale. VDI helps streamline delivery, protection and management of 3D collaboration applications for remote workers. NVIDIA Omniverse™ software on Dell hyperconverged infrastructure provides a reliable and repeatable foundation for remote 3D graphics. The solution unites teams, assets, and software tools in a shared virtual space, enabling diverse workgroups to collaborate on a single project file simultaneously.

3D Design Collaboration in Different Industries

3D workflows are now an essential component of every industry. Everything that will be built, will first be designed and simulated in virtual worlds. Here are some of the ways diverse teams across different industries are leveraging a shared virtual space using VDI to revolutionize 3D design workflows.

Media & Entertainment: Content creators can leverage VDI to operate in real-time using a variety of industry‑standard applications and bring together internal and external tool pipelines from multiple studios, enabling multiple personnel to collaborate, render final shots in real‑time, and create massive virtual sets.Architecture, engineering, construction, and operations (AECO): Building design products can be handled from any location. The VDI environment can be used, for example, to create a digital twin to simulate a construction project and then to monitor and optimize it throughout its lifecycle for maximum efficiency, quality, and cost savings.Manufacturing:  Geographically distributed design and engineering teams and third‑party contractors and suppliers can seamlessly connect and collaborate throughout the production design process, from early‑stage ideation concepts to smart factory automation and robotics workflows.

VDI offers enhanced collaboration amongst innovators in nearly any industry. Learn more about how Dell Technologies and NVIDIA are enabling remote 3D design with Dell Validated Design for VDI with NVIDIA Omniverse

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Intel® Technologies Move Analytics Forward

Data analytics is the key to unlocking the most value you can extract from data across your organization. To create a productive, cost-effective analytics strategy that gets results, you need high performance hardware that’s optimized to work with the software you use.

Modern data analytics spans a range of technologies, from dedicated analytics platforms and databases to deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Just starting out with analytics? Ready to evolve your analytics strategy or improve your data quality? There’s always room to grow, and Intel is ready to help. With a deep ecosystem of analytics technologies and partners, Intel accelerates the efforts of data scientists, analysts, and developers in every industry. Find out more about Intel advanced analytics.

Collaboration Software

Companies typically face three big problems in managing their skills base: Normal learning approaches require too much time to scale up relevant knowledge. Hiring for new skills is expensive and also too slow. And skills from new hires are rarely properly shared.

Businesses of all types have fought to solve these problems. Some conduct ever more advanced offsite or onsite seminars and training – but these are costly, take time, and don’t adapt fast enough to incoming needs of the business and teams. Online training is often perceived as a hassle and participants can become disengaged. Other companies try to jump-start knowledge by bringing in consultants, but this risks only temporarily plugging the gaps.

The reality is that most of these efforts involve throwing money at only the immediate problem. Few budgets can meet the continuous need for up-to-the-minute learning and training, particularly in fast-evolving tech areas such as programming languages, software development, containerization, and cloud computing.

A fresh approach is needed

A handful of companies have found a solution. They’re adding community-driven learning to their existing training approaches. They recognize the wealth of knowledge held by individuals in their teams, and create an agile, natural process to share this knowledge via hands-on workshops. This is a logical progression from existing efforts to connect staff for social bonding and business collaboration.

In practice, what these companies do is create an open, well-managed community of trainers and trainees from within their staff base. Trainees (any employee) feed into a wish list of the specific skills and areas that they want to learn. Trainers (who are staff members with regular, non-training roles) offer lessons on skills or knowledge that they excel in. It is a system open to everyone, with managers, who understand the incoming strategic requirements of the business, helping to prioritize topics and identify potential trainers.

To succeed in this approach, businesses need good leadership and appropriate time allocation. It starts with Chief Technology or Chief Information Officers, who must endorse the importance that the company places on tech innovation, by actively facilitating employees to spend 10 to 20% of their time learning or training others. Once a learning initiative has begun and is nurtured and adapted, it often grows quickly as staff see others taking part.

The results we’re seeing from community learning at GfK

There have been some powerful results for companies running community-driven learning. At GfK, we provide consumer, market, and brand intelligence, with powerful predictive analytics. Since we began our own community-driven learning initiatives three years ago, we’ve witnessed compelling improvements. Our teams can initiate targeted, in-house training whenever necessary, with zero red tape. This has delivered a significant growth in innovation. We’re attracting and retaining top talent, and there are marked improvements in our speed of adaptability.

For example: We swapped initial hackathons for two-day learning events, run five times a year, called “we.innovate”. Our tech teams have full access to these staff-delivered interactive lessons and workshops. The skills covered are shaped by a combination of staff requests and the specific strategic needs of the business. Among the 40 or so topics on the list, we’ve already covered Kubernetes, basic and advanced usage of Git software to track code changes, domain-driven design approaches to software development, cloud computing, cyber security, test-driven development, and much else besides.

Hundreds of our staff have participated in our community learning, and we constantly encourage people to step up as trainers to keep things fresh and relevant. We measure progress by monitoring engagement levels and what the average level of expertise is per individual.

As we have experienced, this is a self-accelerating process. The scale of participation grows fast, meaning the results quickly become transformative at company level. Innovation is the currency of the future, and we are growing ours by drawing out our employees’ substantial individual expertise and distributing it as widely as possible.

To find out more about our innovation, visit gfk.com/careers

IT Leadership