Micro Focus demystifies digital transformation

Perhaps it’s the “transformation” part of digital transformation that alarms a lot of business leaders.

Transformation in its literal form imagines a wholesale shift in corporate strategy and processes, a daunting prospect for a business that wants to ensure business continuity while saving costs.

This anxiety is, in most cases, misplaced.

With the right partner, digital transformation can and should be a relatively seamless process that will often leverage existing infrastructure.

Micro Focus has been helping organisations on their transformation journeys for over four decades. “Micro Focus and our partners are here to help. We offer an extensive range of planning and implementation services for every step of your journey,” says Gonzalo Usandizaga, vice president and general manager for Emerging and Growth Markets at Micro Focus. Micro Focus offers both professional (advisory) services and strategic portfolio management to guide customers through their transformation process.

The advisory services incorporate transformation and solution discovery workshops that are aligned with the IT4IT reference architecture to help organisations assess their current state and define their journey. Applied to cloud transformation, the agenda for a solution discovery workshop looks like this: capture and prioritise business requirements.

Through its project and portfolio management services, Micro Focus can help organisations optimise and streamline existing and cloud-based service portfolios; define business goals, set milestones, and track execution for each project; allocate planning- to-release resources, calculate costs and ROI, and manage projects from a single set of data; and assess, align, and define their unique cloud transformation plan.

The company’s newly launched Cloud transformation platform is based on a five-step lifecycle: Plan, Build, Deliver, Run, Secure.

Build
As digital and physical worlds converge, a software-driven renaissance is disrupting existing business models in the same way that the cloud has disrupted traditional IT. There’s
a trickle-down effect, and today’s applications must deliver new, higher levels of agility, performance, scalability, and security.

Micro Focus solutions address modern development needs – enabling businesses to transform and adapt in two critical ways: First, they strengthen stakeholder alignment, value delivery, and direction for wildly independent development teams – so businesses can build innovative solutions faster. Second, they liberate development resources to release faster – without compromising quality or performance.

Micro Focus’ solutions deliver speed and quality in other ways, too. They enable business leaders to view their landscape from a high level to inform strategic decisions or shift down to a granular project level to track, trace, and audit every artifact. They also help automate processes and tests to shift left– combining coding and testing without having to choose one at the cost of the other. And finally, Micro Focus employs AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics to simulate real-world conditions and focus testing resources.

“With these capabilities, you can shrink development times, reduce defects found in production, avoid unplanned downtime, and release with confidence”, says Usandizaga.

Deliver

Public cloud services deliver infrastructure resources instantly and offer thousands of choices to users. Powered by automation and AI, Micro Focus solutions help organisations deliver freedom with guardrails.

For starters, IT teams can pre-select, aggregate, and automatically deploy cloud services from a single AI-powered portal. Pre- selection ensures that best-fit services with the right options are delivered without slowing users down.

A powerful provisioning engine automatically deploys environments – from bare-metal to virtual, private cloud, public cloud, and full hybrid systems (such as SAP instances) – for all IT, development, and line-of-business users. And because services are built with flexible designs and automation, rather than with rigid templates, it’s easy to adapt to deployment changes in cloud target, provisioned software, scale, or target location.

“From the user perspective, there’s no going back; an AI-powered, self-service portal makes every IT service available to everyone,” says Usandizaga.

With features such as smart search, conversational virtual agents, and smart ticketing, users can easily find, request, and consume information and services from anywhere, at any time. Customer satisfaction and tool adoption rates will inevitably rise as resolution times and ticket volumes fall. Best of all, business workflows can be created, tuned, and fully automated without code – eliminating the need for slow, expensive, hard-coded customisations.

Finally, when workloads are ready to move to the cloud, extensive automation
and step-by-step testing make it possible to migrate quickly, with few errors. The time saved can be allocated to other transformation tasks.

Run
As more services are delivered via more cloud vendors, the ability to keep tabs on the over- all health of corporate assets becomes more difficult. By making the shift to automated, insight-driven monitoring and management – powered by AIOps – IT teams can cut through the complexity and keep services running.

With automated end-to-end monitoring, Micro Focus solutions provide full visibility into services across multiple clouds, applications, data centres, and networks. Businesses can consolidate all monitored data into a single- view data lake to deliver faster fixes, valuable insights, and lower costs. Additionally, Micro Focus tools allow businesses to collect more detailed health and performance information than native, cloud vendor monitoring can provide.

With AI-based analytics, IT can spot red flags, uncover root causes, and resolve issues faster – allowing teams to focus on business impact. They can also restore service faster using automated remediation powered by a library of out-of-the-box runbooks.

Finally, a business’s ability to continuously present IT’s value to stakeholders cannot be underestimated. By quickly building custom dashboards, IT can display the real-time health and performance of cloud services in business terms, together with relevant IT metrics.

“Start monitoring applications, detecting anomalies, and fixing problems with new speed and insight-that is how you streamline Ops spending, satisfy users, and deliver real business value as you move to the cloud,” says Usandizaga.

Secure
High-value assets – identities, applications, and data – require elevated levels of protection during times of transformation. Corporate budgets, brand, financial viability, and even shareholder value can all take a severe hit when bad things happen.

With Micro Focus solutions, organisations can strengthen their cyber resilience by intelligently adapting their security to protect identities, applications, and data. IT security teams can also detect advanced and insider threats – enabling them to evolve for future threats and regulations

“This approach is critical,” says Usandizaga. “It closes the gaps that arise from complex use cases and provides a unified view of your environment.” When advanced threats inevitably get through, Micro Focus advanced analytics and automation will respond fast, so experts can act in near real-time before significant damage occurs.

But Micro Focus solutions do more than accelerate detection and response times. They also help ITSec evolve and sustain their security posture, says Usandizaga. “Employing all the data within your security ecosystem, they create a feedback loop with which you can continually analyse your protections against new threats – then adapt and revise your enforcement, governance, and policies accordingly,” he adds.

“In this way, you can intelligently adapt your cybersecurity to manage an increasing attack surface, which now includes an unprecedented number of home workers and external connections,” Usandizaga says.