The speed at which companies today are moving and creating long-term viability does not allow for lengthy rollouts of infrastructure as it has in years past. Slow and steady has not been the norm for a while now. But while speed is imperative, it must not come at the cost of adaptability.

IT leaders need to expect the unexpected and build into their systems the ability to adapt to changing market needs and overcome new obstacles.

For me, that’s where digital agility wins. It is the ability to rapidly adapt your organization in response to change and challenges through technology innovation, which is often iterative, rather than requiring a total rethink every time.

Creating Stratascale: A New Type of Consulting Firm

When SHI President and CEO Thai Lee asked me to lead a new company called Stratascale that brought together the benefits of SHI’s three decades of experience delivering the very best technologies with a fresh consultative approach, I was totally on board. I saw this as an opportunity to add new value to our clients’ cloud, data intelligence, automation, digital experience, and cybersecurity journeys.

At Stratascale, our main focal point is on cloud architecture. We think of cloud as a state of existence. SHI does an incredible job of meeting customers’ cloud requirements, but with Stratascale, we’re going to be able to engage earlier, help customers define their cloud requirements, and then continue to partner with them as they deploy and manage their chosen technologies.

Whether those capabilities are contained within their four walls, a hosted environment, colocation environment, or a public cloud environment, our team is completely ready to engage. We believe clients need to create a strategic hybrid cloud environment that meets their needs.

Data intelligence is a space where businesses are continually required to gather, manage, and act on various datasets. At Stratascale, our consultants will assist clients by zeroing in on their business use cases, helping IT and business leaders clarify their vision of how they want to become more effective in making decisions, and ultimately more automated in delivering services for their customers. Once that vision is solidified and understood, our consultants will help discover what data is currently available, what new data needs to be collected, how to analyze it, and how to overcome obstacles such as data sprawl and data siloes, enabling a clean data pipeline so that vision can come to life.

Automation is becoming table stakes for every company’s IT function. There is increased consumer demand to be more impactful and relevant. Companies can’t afford to be slow to respond, costly to engage with, or inefficient in addressing customers’ requirements. Stratascale will be instrumental in allowing our clients to automate in both the public and private cloud, whether it is infrastructure as code, orchestration, cloud management platforms, or software defined networks.

At Stratascale, we see digital experience as leveraging a hybrid cloud-centric operational environment to deliver modern applications to staff, customers, and business partners through automation, real-time access to data with integrated security, and optimized performance. To give us a competitive advantage in this area, we moved SHI’s Cloud and Innovative Solutions team into the Stratascale company. This enables us to incubate capabilities for our customers between Stratascale and SHI much faster.

Cybersecurity pervades IT. The evolution of cloud, automation, data intelligence, and digital experience has created an expanded threat landscape unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Businesses are facing new threats internally and externally and struggling with lack of governance to processes and visibility, as their stakeholders expand into cloud infrastructures and SaaS, and migrate to remote work environments. The security architectures that have been put in place in the last three to five years are now essentially obsolete.

We expect Stratascale’s security consulting and engineering teams to be hyper-focused on ensuring our clients find new ways to reduce their attack surface and stay vigilant in protecting their most critical assets. We will help clients translate new policies and maturing frameworks into architectures that are applicable for today’s challenges and viable for the future. Finally, we will help clients optimize platforms and tools in a unifying manner verses a sprawl of 50-plus tools in their environment.

How It Will All Work to Your Advantage  

The Stratacale/SHI connection allows us to approach clients and attack business challenges in a unique way. Utilizing our research analysts and technical advisors, we will have unsurpassed access and insight into cutting-edge technologies. Solutions can be rapidly field tested at our Stratascale/SHI Customer Innovation Center and validated with customers and OEM partners through our field CTOs and principal architects.

Contact us for more information about our practices, solutions, and service offerings.