Question

A business is always pushing to ensure its employees can always work so providing fault tolerant systems is extremely important. How do you balance business requirements for IT systems with a scalable and redundant infrastructure?

Answer 1

The business landscape is changing. The transformative forces of mobility, cloud, big data and social collaboration have all proven to be key drivers of change.

IT organizations are under increasing pressure to respond faster to the needs of the business. IT teams are being challenged to create a scalable infrastructure able to take advantage of new innovative technologies that deliver new ways to get work done without high capital investment.business landscape due to outdated infrastructures which inhibit them from taking full advantage of new business enhancing technologies and applications.

Realizing these benefits requires a deep knowledge of the technologies required to design, build and run a modern infrastructure that is highly secure and available at a time when the people with those skills are in short supply, expensive and difficult to retain.

One responsibility of IT leaders is to provide executive staff with appropriate background, analysis, and recommendations about IT infrastructure, focusing on the impact that inappropriately maintained or out-of-date IT infrastructure may have on the academic, research, and administrative functions of the institution.

For existing infrastructure, begin by making a determination of its status (or "health") before determining what type of project is necessary. The type of project — initial implementation (for new infrastructure), maintenance, reimplementation, or technology migration — dictates the factors to be considered in the analysis. After capabilities are studied, the bulk of the analytical effort is spent in assessing benefits, risks, and costs. Finally, a Value Scorecard brings together the analysis and compares the project under consideration with alternatives, including maintaining the status quo.

This is common in IT — install a new infrastructure and end up maintaining the old one for a long time, or install a new technology and discover that a new version supersedes it in short order. So while you can expect various benefits from new infrastructure, there is always a risk that those benefits will not be realized. A thorough risk analysis will look at the impact of expected benefits not being realized, as well as other potential risks, including cost overruns and impact on other systems or departments. Meeting with staff from multiple departments is one way to help avoid surprises and demonstrate to decision makers that risks have been studied broadly.

Ongoing maintenance costs should be considered, including hardware, software, other equipment, construction, and personnel. Personnel costs (both contractors and employees) are often a significant figure and should include full- and part-time people involved in the project, both from IT and any other departments involved, such as the construction department.