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Corporate Real Estate and IT Organizations: It's Complicated!

As the Cloud migrations accelerate across vast sections of businesses worldwide, an emerging problem has arisen that is seldom discussed. It usually plays out as an internal battle between the corporate functions. Namely, the battle between Corporate IT Real Estate groups and Corporate IT.

A typical scenario involves an IT transformationalist leader that convinces his/her Top-tier leadership of drastically reducing IT spending by committing to a rapid IT Estate transformation. Such IT leader(s) are given carte blanche to execute their plans if the promised deadlines for deliveries are achieved. The logic behind such initiatives often begins with high-level analysis at the application level. Assumptions are made that applications can be “lift-and-shifted” on a schedule that would be closely followed by the Real Estate savings which would come from such a migration. Now consider an Enterprise customer that is trying to do this for a pair of Data Centres that has hundreds of applications with vertical dependencies on compute, and storage. Add horizontal dependencies for Storage and Height Availability, and then throw in complexities of hypervisor dependencies on Boot Luns. Then there is the DR aspect. The resources in focus could be part of the DR assets for a remote application. Consider implications of hardware security modules used in legacy applications for encryption. They must stay powered on until every single application in that location sunsets.

When the timeline of application migration is promised and attempted – it is critical to consider such vertical and horizontal asset sharing at the datacenters, and often across data centres. Corporate Real Estate organisations are often left in the dark about these plans and are unable to make sound decisions around critical Real Estate facilities planning. IT Transformationalists consider the Real Estate arm as their enemy and try to intentionally leave them out of all planning phases. These scenarios often play out in a way where a promised application migration schedule does not result in the expected realisation of Real Estate footprint reduction.

Wise executives, those instilling the culture of collaboration between these two critical functions will be positioning for success. A combination of these two organisations that share information about applications and gain insight from their Real Estate counterparts on all the affected entities with respect to Power and Rack Space utilization will find themselves long-term financial winners in the race to transform their IT Estate.

PTS has long been a trusted partner for organisations managing their IT Estate. When you are ready to start the journey in your next Hybrid or Full Cloud transformation, we are ready to take on the challenge.