IT infrastructure has been the lifeblood of organizations since the beginning. Despite its significance in business success, IT infrastructure has long been viewed as a cost center. For this very reason, many organizations continue to operate with their monolithic, old-fashioned IT systems, not realizing the impact they have on operations and efficiency. This is especially true for organizations that experience exponential growth but fail to keep up with the demands due to their constrained systems.
The Significance of IT Infrastructure Optimization
No matter how big or small a business is, IT Infrastructure should support growth and be a strategic asset. But old-fashioned legacy systems not only bring efficiency down; they also cost a lot of money, are extremely prone to risk, and are poor at driving business agility. IT infrastructure optimization can help prevent wasted resources while increasing the speed and pace of business performance. It can help in:
- Eliminating business silos and maximizing ROI and revenue
- Streamlining processes and improving interoperability
- Improving scalability and enhancing security
- Boosting productivity and fostering agility
- Reducing outages, failure, and downtime
- Improve system manageability and lower maintenance costs
Top Tips to Driving a Successful IT Infrastructure Optimization
To optimize infrastructure, organizations must have a thorough understanding of their existing IT landscape, be aware of current weaknesses, and determine areas where optimization is most necessary. Here are 5 tips on how to drive a successful IT infrastructure optimization:
1. Build Strong Connection between Business and IT Teams
Given the fact that technology enables modern businesses, a strong connection between business and IT teams is necessary to ensure that technology solutions perfectly solve business challenges faced across different departmental objectives, cultures, and incentives. Such alignment can ensure technology works in tandem with the strategy, mission, and goals of the organization while also reflecting other priorities such as innovation. It can also help overcome common bottlenecks that hinder IT performance, increase enterprise-wide collaboration, enhance speed-to-market, and improve returns from IT investment.
2. Move Away from Legacy Systems
Legacy systems, although an integral part of day-to-day business functioning, are also performance and cost-draining. If you want to optimize your IT infrastructure, you need to look at ways you can move away from these time, cost, and resource-intensive systems: from re-architecting the system, to re-platforming, re-hosting, or completely redesigning them in a way that it meets technical, operational, and business requirements. You can also embrace a microservices-based architecture to easily and quickly implement new features and changes and ensure your IT systems keep up with the functionality, scalability, availability, and security requirements of a modern world.
3. Enable Automation
Mundane IT operations, when done manually, cost a lot in terms of time and effort that is put by highly qualified resources in carrying out simple, administrative tasks. Embracing automation can help free up these critical resources while simultaneously minimizing human error and allowing smoother delivery of services. Automation can allow complex IT ecosystems and operations to be managed more efficiently and effectively and allow expert resources to focus on aspects of the business that need radical and strategic thinking. Automation can also greatly bring down the time spent on managing complex infrastructure while also increasing overall uptime and reliability.
4. Embrace the Cloud
Organizations that continue to rely on traditional, on-premises data centers can achieve a lot by embracing the cloud. As demand grows, cloud can help keep pace with business goals while also allowing the business to be extremely scalable and flexible with new trends and changes. Since cloud offers several benefits across availability of resources, flexibility of deployments, and security of systems, it helps in more efficient and cost-effective use of IT resources. It also brings CapEx down to zero, allowing organizations to only pay for what they use and achieve better ROI – while rooting out redundancies that come from wasted resources.
5. Implement Predictive and Preventive Analytics
Given how complex IT ecosystems have now become, performance issues are given. It depends on how quickly and efficiently an organization can deal with these challenges that makes all the difference. Implementing predictive and preventive analysis is a great way to optimize IT infrastructure. Through constant real-time monitoring of networks, systems, and end-user devices, analytics can help identify current and potential future issues, allowing IT teams to take the necessary action to curtail their impact. When paired with AI, they can also automatically rectify minor issues – without requiring qualified experts to address the issue at hand.
Take Your IT Infrastructure Optimization to the Next Level
In today’s constantly evolving business and IT landscape, IT infrastructure optimization delivers a bevy of benefits across enhanced performance, improved productivity, and better integration. If you want to drive successful optimization, building a strong connection between your business and IT teams, moving away from legacy systems, enabling automation, embracing the cloud, and implementing analytics are some ways to drive the required results. But instead of doing all these on your own, you can partner with a Managed Services Provider like Synoptek who can help you maintain various infrastructure components using scalable resources and expertise.
A Managed Services Provider can not only offer the right consultancy services to manage your IT infrastructure, they can also provide the resources you need to deal with common IT challenges while freeing up internal IT resources for strategic initiatives. They can help you in cost-optimizing your infrastructure, strike the right balance between cost and performance, and maximize the value of your IT assets – bringing added value to your organization.
