IT and Cloud Infrastructure Management

Summary

All of the value creating processes you have require applications and data to operate, and those applications and data must run on and be stored on physical hardware, either your own, or a cloud service providers.

Why

Your organization will not be able to operate without the appropriate hardware. You applications and data must reside somewhere that is stable, capable, secure, available, flexible, scalable, and backed up. You need computing and storage capacity to operate your IT Infrastructure and processes. The right hardware will enable your critical software that performs all of your proprietary and value adding services.

What

The IT infrastructure of your organization is its physical infrastructure down to the server level of the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) model. In this case, the hardware will be either physical boxes with servers on-premises, or servers managed in the cloud, and the virtualized machines on those servers. Many organizations operate a hybrid environment with some servers on-premises and some on the cloud, which may utilize VMs on either or both. In many cases, organizations are also using Paas and Saas (Platform as a Service and Software as a Service), which means they are just buying the services that are provided by other vendors and integrating them into their operations. There are many other configurations and architectures when it comes to the hardware that provides the storage and computing capacity for your operations. All of these considerations should be taken into consideration given your organizations’ specific use cases, and functional and non-functional requirements.

How

There are many different vendors and configurations for the hardware that your organization will use to support its operations. There are templates, demos, exercises, best practice tools, and requirements gathering workshops that you can run, in addition to just working directly with your technical SMEs in order to make decisions on your IT Infrastructure and hardware requirements. A best practices approach would be program and project based and would work with your IT PMO (if you are an enterprise level organization). Otherwise, you will want to come up with a list of critical and core processes and make sure that they are supported by the appropriate hardware.