Often, when an organization is ready to refresh its storage, compute and networking infrastructure, IT and business stakeholders want to start the conversation with a specific product in mind. Perhaps they have a solid relationship with a vendor, or they’ve heard about a best-of-breed solution at a conference, and they just want to find the best price on their desired solution.

However, we’ve found that the process is actually more important than the product during a refresh. Sure, modern data center infrastructure can improve performance and reliability, but the most critical aspect of a refresh is identifying a solution that will help an organization meet its specific business needs.

Here are five steps we follow to help organizations ensure success when they refresh their infrastructure.

As companies across industries have discovered in recent years, hyperconverged infrastructure offers simplicity and scalability in the data center. While these benefits are important for almost any business, HCI can be particularly useful for financial firms.

Here are three ways HCI can help banks, credit unions and capital market firms face down common challenges in the industry.

IT modernization is a broad category that encompasses solutions ranging from hybrid cloud and multicloud environments to containerization, hyperconvergence and flash storage. With so many organizations in need of an infrastructure refresh, it’s understandable that high-level conversations about enterprise IT often start with the need to modernize technology environments.

But really, this approach is backward. Instead, business and IT leaders should begin with the problems they’re experiencing, and then look to see how modernized IT solutions can address them. Here are five common business issues associated with aging data centers, along with modern IT solutions that can address them. If your organization is dealing with any of these, it may be time to consider how to go about modernizing your IT infrastructure.

The connected campus can have a number of benefits for colleges and universities, ranging from improved security to enhanced collaboration — and, of course, it can create a competitive edge in student and faculty recruitment. But to enable effective end-user solutions, institutions must first invest in the networking and data center infrastructure necessary to power them.

Colleges and universities looking to provide students and faculty with a robust connected-campus experience should explore the following infrastructure solutions and practices.

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is the fastest-growing category in data center infrastructure. The reasons for this are clear: This technology eliminates silos, simplifies management and enables scalability — three benefits that organizations need to support their digital transformation initiatives.

Data centers have changed quite a bit since pizza boxes reigned supreme. We replaced those servers with virtualization, reducing our physical footprint and utilizing more of the CPUs and memory. Next came the idea of fully tested systems in the form of converged infrastructure: making sure different components of compute, storage and networking worked well…