Five Essentials of Modern IT Infrastructure Management

Enabling an optimized user experience for operating businesses in today’s digital economy gives you a competitive edge. To meet the ever growing consumer demands, organizations need to ensure constant growth of their IT infrastructure. But when it comes to building and operating IT infrastructure, changes continue to get faster, making predictions regarding the future difficult. To address this, modern IT infrastructure management is the best bet as it is a combination of good planning, alignment among core teams, and sound execution.

To successfully drive the implementation of modern IT Infrastructure, organizations need to consider the five aspects below:

1. Dynamic Configuration: Today, a majority of the IT environments rely on limited configuration efforts. To tackle the current IT Infrastructure service challenges, one must deploy proper configuration as part of their scope. From a bird’s eye perspective, this comes down to complete the oversight from the business leaders. In other words, configuration efforts must be aligned with the business objectives set by the leadership teams.

Thereafter, when teams deploy supervision on new technology, the process should be automated, low-touch, and turnkey. Supervision across both leading and lagging metrics is the most critical metric for the IT infrastructure management to help the IT teams keep track and improve. It provides dynamic exploration capabilities which reduces technology-specific complexities and allows the staff to adapt to the new technology quickly. 

2. Unified Analysis and Monitoring: The Information Technology teams need to adapt to a unified view of the entire environment. Whether it is the traditional infrastructure, or a hyper-converged infrastructure, you need a unified approach to supervise it all.

To meet the requirements of delivering excellent IT infrastructure services and a seamless user experience, the IT teams need a cohesive solution to gather and study data in real-time. Data sets can originate from external stakeholders in the form of real-time usage, or from internal teams in the form of bugs and glitches as they arise. Gathering all these data enables the ability to slice data on the basis of development, infrastructure elements, test environment, and more.

3. AI-driven Intelligence: As IT infrastructure management continues to get more dynamic and complex, the volume of data gathered continues to get more abundant. Correlating the abundance of data using disparate tools and approaches becomes a challenge. For instance, connecting the metric data and logs, or correlate infrastructural and non-infrastructural intelligence to gain a singular view of what is happening.

To contend with such challenges, the IT infrastructure team needs to augment monitoring tools with AI-driven analysis technology, such as, AIOps which provides the power to correlate data and derive the right conclusions. This way, teams can efficiently track trends to predict abnormal situations to fuel issue prevention and improve the IT Infrastructure posture.

4. Extensibility: When Disneyland in China was set to open, the event was marred by a tragedy at a Disneyland nearly halfway around the world. Speaking about the incident, then CEO Robert Iger spoke about having access to enough data as a means to not just respond in time, but to respond with empathy.

At all time, company CEOs must be able to respond with maximum speed and agility. For this reason and given the fact that most businesses are digital today, they need a platform to manage IT infrastructure requirements in ways that make business sense.

Extensibility as a principle represents elastic growth for the organization, supported adequately by its IT infrastructure. In other words, as a pillar of IT infrastructure management, extensibility allows the company to scale, and scale rapidly, to meet the risks and opportunities in its environment.

5. Automation: Today, IT infrastructure management teams are under constant pressure to ensure superior IT Infrastructure services. They must use automation as a strong monitoring strategy to address this. Automated discovery of new systems and automatic deployment of new elements in the environment are important to support the ever-changing infrastructure. We must also ensure that reports and dashboards can self-generate and refresh on its own.

Moreover, IT management teams need to leverage self-response and automated remediation workflows abilities. For example, once a possible bottleneck is located by the supervision software, it could auto-generate a workflow by passing the data to the collaboration tool or auto-generate a remediation workflow by collaborating with an automation tool. Additionally, if a bottleneck is spotted and a new cloud server is provisioned to handle the additional need, this can avoid IT disasters, and indeed, prevent these disasters from ever showing up. 

Having a sound IT infrastructure management plan in place can become the backbone for agile growth. Companies that plan ahead and work with a dependable service provider can speed up repair, reduce supervision efforts, improve end-user experience, and accelerate new deployments to enhance their offerings as well as the end-user’s experience.