There’s no question that the pace of business change continues to accelerate. Businesses of all sizes must move rapidly to seize new opportunities and embrace new solutions and services that give them competitive advantage.

But there’s a lot of truth to the old saw that change comes hard. While it might be easy to envision a new business direction, it’s much more difficult to put it into practice. Operational processes must be developed and technologies implemented to support those new processes.

And, all too often, the technology infrastructure is not up to the task: Gartner analysts estimate that, through 2015, just 10 percent of organizations will have the IT operational and infrastructure agility to respond to the speed of change required by the business.

As sobering as that statistic is, it represents a significant increase in IT agility over the next two years. Less than 2 percent of organizations have IT infrastructures that are sufficiently responsive today.

Is your IT infrastructure holding you back?

Technology is supposed to be a business enabler but in reality it often sets limitations. Moving to a new software platform requires upgrading your server — a cost and business disruption you can’t afford right now. Giving employees mobile access to applications and data could give your business a leg up on the competition, but how do you get there? And don’t forget that half of your PCs are outdated, your backup processes are struggling to support growing amounts of data and security threats keep you awake at night.

It’s hard to have an agile and responsive IT infrastructure when you’re struggling to keep things up-to-date and stable. And that’s where Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) can help. Instead of investing in new IT systems — which you will still have to manage and maintain — you can tap into the service provider’s infrastructure. For a monthly fee you gain access to the latest technology and all the services needed to keep it up-to-date and running smoothly.

Best of all, IaaS can scale on demand to meet changing business requirements. Abba’s IaaS solution utilizes virtualization to enable rapid rollout of new applications and services for our customers. We also have developed operational best practices that bring high levels of efficiency along with high availability and security.

That “people and process” component is very important. The authors of the Gartner report explain that many in-house IT departments are risk averse and reluctant to change, creating an IT environment that is unresponsive to business demands. By outsourcing your infrastructure to a trusted partner such as Abba, you gain a fresh perspective and optimized processes along with the technology itself.

And, oh by the way, IaaS helps you preserve capital, save money and focus on growing your business.

Bottom line: If your IT infrastructure is not keeping pace with the business, perhaps it’s time to consider an alternative. IaaS can give you ready access to a more agile IT infrastructure that can support changing business demands while eliminating countless headaches and risks.