Driving Growth Through Modern IT Strategies: Why Flexibility Matters

Flexibility is the future. Your IT department’s flexibility is essential for driving growth and supporting modernization throughout the entire enterprise. It’s critical for your company to embrace hybrid, distributed and heterogenous environments; without these, you’ll lack the opportunities to adapt to market changes, outperform competitors and innovate. 

To create a truly modern IT environment and scale your organization, flexibility is your key to success. 

Scaling IT: Pains and gains

When businesses need to scale their IT operations, they face a number of challenges — all of which stem from a lack of flexibility. Some of the biggest hurdles include:

• Rigid vendor requirements. Vendor lock-in means you’re trapped in someone else’s roadmap. Your vendor may not prioritize features that would benefit your company or may not be responsive to market changes. Without the freedom to get the features you need, your product development can be hindered. Vendor lock-in also means vendors can raise their prices whenever they want, which pulls financial resources away from areas of the business where you could be innovating. 
• Forced migrations. If one of your major platforms hits EOL or raises its prices out of your budget, you may not have flexible options. You may be forced to migrate to another platform. It’s expensive, and it slows down your value-producing work, too. 
• Fragmented systems. In modern environments, most enterprises have multiple systems, including their CRM, various cloud providers, several communication tools, redundant data storages, legacy applications and more. In some ways, the variety of devices and systems is a good thing: it offers you the tools you need. However, if these systems aren’t connected, you can’t scale them, keep them secure, or get maximum value from them. 
• Security risks. Growing your business can come with security risks, especially in hybrid and diverse IT environments. The more surface area there is, the more your risk of attacks. You’ll need to find solutions that can handle the security and monitoring of all your devices. 

The growth advantage with SUSE

Scaling your IT department provides the framework for your whole organization to grow. If you’re prioritizing growth in your enterprise, SUSE gives you an advantage. SUSE can power your company’s growth with:

• Flexible IT frameworks. SUSE Multi-Linux Support provides centralized management and support for all of your Enterprise Linux distributions, reducing complexity. You can keep your legacy infrastructure while adding containers, modifying modules, and picking a different file system. You also have the freedom to run your workloads on whichever enterprise Linux meets your business goals best. 
• Cost-effective scalability. Keep your cost management predictable. SUSE’s transparent pricing frees up your resources to invest in growth-focused projects and plan for future expansions. No more paying for more workloads or licenses as you scale; your growth with SUSE is affordable and unlimited. 
• Compliant audits. Whether you’re in a regulated industry or you want to double down on your security, compliance and auditing trails are easier with SUSE. Our logs provide all the info you need to pass audits and make sure your organization is compliant. 
• Reliable security. SUSE’s updates and patches protect you against future attacks while leaving plenty of room (and bandwidth) for you to continue your work. Solutions like SUSE Rancher Prime also provide visibility so you can identify threats before they hinder your growth. 
• Future-ready modernization. Adapt your IT strategy to meet today’s demands while preparing for tomorrow’s opportunities. 
• Filled skills gaps. When your IT environment is flexible, your employees can work with the tools they’re familiar with. They can do their best work without compromising security, causing integration issues or taking time to learn a new tool. 
• Centralized management. With centralized Linux management and visibility, your company can find opportunities to accelerate growth, such as streamlining operations, identifying tasks that can be automated, better communicating and collaborating and making data-based decisions.
• Endless innovation. SUSE Multi-Linux Support empowers your enterprise Linux estate with the flexibility to select the right distribution for every scenario now and in the future, futureproofing innovation where it matters most. You have the freedom to pick which tools are best to use so you drive growth.

The SUSE vision for growth

SUSE was built on open source principles of flexibility and choice. Our solutions empower organizations to use the tools that will provide the best growth for their unique business while still ensuring security and compliance. 

You can take advantage of SUSE’s enterprise solutions to modernize your organization. Fuel innovation and growth through flexibility with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), a server built for diverse Linux environments that is as reliable as it is adaptable. Another option is SUSE Multi-Linux Manager, a solution for centralized visibility and management to accelerate your company growth. 

Whatever your current environment looks like, you can build an IT strategy that fuels growth and aligns with your business goals using SUSE. To see how SUSE helped other organizations become flexible, fuel growth and modernize, read our success stories.