IT infrastructure is a key aspect of every business, but it’s often considered a burden to be managed rather than an asset. Optimizing your IT infrastructure can help streamline your business processes and free up resources that can be used more effectively elsewhere. Let’s understand more about the optimization of IT infrastructure.
What is IT Infrastructure Optimization?
Simply put, it’s the process of reducing liability and bringing more agility to your processes. The original standard of managing IT resources was only to ensure optimal use of resources across computing, storage, and networks. Ensuring minimum business downtime was the focus. However, these aspects are now considered as a bare minimum and the standard of management has changed. Now the focus is on optimizing the IT infrastructure to ensure optimum productivity at lower costs. At the highest level, your infrastructure is expected to be a strategic asset for the business and support its growth and success.
Types of IT infrastructure optimization
It is crucial to have an optimization strategy in place to avoid over or under-investment in the infrastructure and optimize cost management. Your IT infrastructure can be optimized in three ways:
· Optimizing on-premise infrastructure: this often means reducing the number or capacity of machines you have in your data centers. For example, you may bring the number of machines down from 30 to 25 and save 20% of your cost. However, consider how this would affect business downtime. Ensure that while reducing on-premise infrastructure, you still have enough capacity to handle peak demands without slowing down.
· Optimizing your cloud infrastructure: with regular audits of your cloud infrastructure, you can map which services or applications use most of your resources and costs. Then, you can optimize these functions by assigning the appropriate resources to the workloads. It allows you to reduce resource wastage and also optimizes the functioning of the application or service you’re using. You could also optimize only the most expensive components of the infrastructure so that they run only for the hours they’re used and some other components may run 24×7.
· Migrating to hybrid management: you can migrate your workload from on-premise data centers to the cloud. You can also move dynamic workloads to a public cloud which is cheaper than maintaining private and on-premise data centers.
Optimizing the IT infrastructure
Now that you know the type of optimization your business needs, you can make it a reality by using some of the following practices:
· Auditing: you must audit the IT infrastructure that is in place now. It would help you understand the weaker areas of the IT function, so you can decide which areas would benefit the most from optimization.
· Automation: audit how much time is spent on mundane, repetitive tasks each day and map out the functions that can be automated. Automation saves a lot of time and frees up your IT resources. You can then use them for another project or activity. It also allows you to manage complex IT ecosystems more efficiently and ensures smoother delivery of services.
· Combine data centers: if you only use on-premise or private cloud infrastructure, you might benefit from moving to a hybrid management system. It makes sense to keep highly sensitive data or legacy applications on your on-premise or private cloud to ensure security requirements are met. However, the rest of your workload can be moved to one or more public clouds to help reduce costs and enable remote access to employees not working from the office.
· Managed services: Managed Service Providers (MSPs) have expertise in infrastructure optimization and more resources to manage it. So, they can manage your IT infrastructure more efficiently.
