IT Blog

A company’s IT infrastructure is its foundation, enabling it to serve clients faster and consistently remain operating. The majority of businesses believe that effective IT infrastructure management increases their competitive edge and maximizes corporate efficiency. Therefore, it’s crucial that you, as a business leader, don’t view your IT infrastructure as simply a support system.

In this blog article, we’ll help you plan the most efficient IT infrastructure for your company. We’ll go over the many components of an IT infrastructure and offer advice on how to pick the best ones for your requirements.

What is IT infrastructure?

IT infrastructure, in its most basic definition, is a grouping of hardware, software, and network components that help supply business systems and processes that are supported by IT.

Monitoring, regulating, and securing essential infrastructure components that are necessary for the provision of essential business services are the focus of IT infrastructure management. Software programs and networking elements make up the majority of these components. However, physical elements like networking hardware, data storage facilities, and other such facilities continue to be the core emphasis of IT infrastructure management.

Because IT infrastructure is so complex, it is typically divided into three main categories: systems management, network management, and storage management. The goal is still to minimize downtime, provide strong security, and preserve corporate productivity. IT Infrastructure Teams are generally responsible for managing the following IT elements in an organization: 

• Hardware
• Software
• Asset lifecycle
• Data Centre and storage facilities
• Network Security
• Wireless and wired network operations
• Etc.

Strategies to plan your IT Infrastructure

1. Connect your IT infrastructure to your business goals: Knowing the initial goals of your firm will help you plan your IT infrastructure more effectively. Understanding your organization’s goals, objectives, and mission will help you link your infrastructure’s systems or components to overall organizational outcomes. Ask your top managers what metrics they believe are most important for the performance of the organization if you are an IT administrator. Here, IT managers typically use two metrics:
   • Primary Driver: These IT infrastructure elements are directly in charge of facilitating changes in your company’s goals.
   • Secondary Driver: These are the infrastructure elements that directly support the primary driver.
2. Employ a suitable Number of People: The objective is to reduce costs so they can spend in other critical areas, thus businesses frequently overlook the idea of hiring a suitable number of IT staff members and system administrators. But keep in mind that if you mess up IT infrastructure management, it can seriously damage your reputation. Fixing data breaches or losses after they occur can be much more expensive than taking preventative security measures. Therefore, don’t skimp on the size of your IT team. Your server’s size is another thing to take into account. The industry norm favors one administrator over ten actual servers. For physical servers and virtual ones, the quotes in SMBs are 30:1 and 80:1, respectively.
3. Document everything: Keep records of everything. You should never over-customize your IT infrastructure. Customizability might be effective for your current employees, but not for those who have just joined your IT team or taken over a management role. When designing infrastructure from the ground up, aim for simplicity rather than complication. Consider it this way: Will your IT infrastructure fall apart if you, as a CEO, CIO, or business owner, are not involved in day-to-day operations? Document everything to make the process transparent, straightforward, and forthright. The essential cornerstone of a successful IT system is good documentation.
4. Team up with IT Infrastructure Experts: IT Infrastructure as a Service is an option if you are short on time and resources (IaaS). IaaS is one of the different kinds of cloud computing services where a third-party service provider hosts your company’s IT components such as servers, storage, hardware, and software on the cloud. It enables you to save money on system backup, updates, and maintenance. The fundamental problem here continues to be a lack of control over operations and data security.

Ready to build a secure IT infrastructure for your business? Contact us to get started