In a fast-paced environment, in which technology is changing rapidly to meet the needs of your business, it’s important to know if the systems you have in place support your vision. Do you have the necessary IT infrastructure and resources to support the activity, connectivity, and performance needs of your organization in both the short and long term? That’s what an infrastructure review is designed to identify.
The more ambitious your plans, the more likely your infrastructure isn’t robust enough to meet your needs. Whether starting down the path of digital transformation or in the midst of major upgrades, your IT infrastructure should serve your goals. But canned infrastructure assessments and reviews only get you so far. Sure, they offer a great boilerplate for building and pushing reports up the chain, but at the end of the day, you want someone who can provide actionable recommendations and a clearly outlined roadmap based on your specific business requirements. Let’s take a closer look at what that process looks like.
Developing an Infrastructure Review Plan
The first step in infrastructure review is understanding what the systems are being measured against. Working with both IT and key business stakeholders, it’s important to fully understand the pain points and future business objectives of your organization. How can technology ensure the right sizing for your systems, growth modeling for your business, and enablement of key business processes to meet your objectives? Technology is a tool to serve your business – an infrastructure review is a perfect time to ensure it is doing just that.
Once these elements have been identified, an assessment can be tailored around your current and future needs to help alleviate your pain points. The goal is to position your business to execute future business strategies while resolving existing challenges. This process includes reviewing network equipment age, configuration, and expected lifespan, and reviewing compute and storage environments.
Evaluating Your IT Systems Through Multiple Lenses
An effective infrastructure review evaluates your systems through multiple lenses. It’s not just about whether your hardware is out of date. It needs to support initiatives across your business. Key areas evaluated include:
- Security – Are your current IT systems sufficient to support security for your organization? Have you fully optimized for greater connectivity with an increase in remote work? These are the types of questions you want to be answered.
- Performance – Are your current systems unable to meet the availability and performance needs of your business? Have those needs recently changed or are they about to change?
- Business Continuity – What happens if there is a disruption to your systems? Do you have the systems in place to protect data, recover quickly from a physical or security disruption?
- Business Enablement – What are your short and long-term goals as a business? Does your current IT infrastructure support those goals and if not, what changes can be made to do so?
In addition to these four key business pillars, infrastructure can be evaluated holistically – taking into account network, firewall, server, compute, storage, and other elements – or ala carte, depending on your business goals and current technology. At the same time, the recommendations made as part of such a review need to match the staffing resources available to your organization. Can your current IT team fully optimize and manage potential changes to infrastructure, and if not, what additional support is needed?
It’s also important in some cases to perform end-user compute modeling and optimization. By analyzing facility workflows and staffing levels, it’s possible to identify opportunities for reduction in PC fleet and to improve user experience. Instead of following an arbitrary checklist or specifications that may be years old, get a better sense of exactly what you need and when you need it.
Choosing a Partner for Your Infrastructure Review
A good infrastructure report provides an independent third-party assessment of your current IT systems and a map for how to improve and optimize your systems to meet current best practices and standards. The right infrastructure review can provide the blueprint you need for future investment, support staff requirements, and future optimization of your systems. You’ll get a better sense of the risks your organization faces due to outdated or incorrectly paired systems, where you can improve performance and overall availability, and what general improvements can be made to meet your specific operational needs.
Bedroc works closely with our clients to provide reports that address the range of issues that might impact them in both the short and long term. We’re vendor agnostic, so you’ll get the right assessment and recommendations for your business, not ours, and we’ll continue to work with you once the final report is issued to execute changes that improve your performance. Learn more about the infrastructure review process and how Bedroc can support yours. Contact us today to schedule a consultation and discuss.