As it stands today, how a business manages and manages its own IT infrastructure, data and applications has a direct and measurable impact on its success. In the era of digital transformation, IT services not only influence, but determine the operational activities of all departments of any organization. Regardless of the size of your business, employees and customers will have the same high demands on the quality of IT services, their availability and continuity. And these requirements will only grow.
Finally the moment came when it became clear that the old extensive approaches to IT development were no longer applicable. Solving emerging problems by simply increasing technical capacity – buying a new server, disk array or software – is not really a solution, but only postpones it. It is necessary to analyze the current situation, put things in order in activities and plan actions.
Creation of an effective IT infrastructure design and implementation is a rather complex process that requires a high level of competence in various areas of IT. It is necessary to analyze a large amount of information in order to ultimately obtain an effective IT infrastructure that meets the needs of the business..
ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library)
It is a library of documents that allow you to standardize IT infrastructure management processes. ITIL was first created in the UK in the late 1980s and has been developed further in many countries and is based on practice in thousands of companies around the world. ITIL v.3 is currently being developed. ITIL provides guidance for planning, delivering, and maintaining services, provides guidance for managing applications, infrastructure, and security, and helps plan the future of IT. ITIL is based on two standards ISO 9001 and ISO 20000 (analogous to the British standard BS 15000).
MOF (Microsoft Operation Framework)
It is a set of documents created by Microsoft based on ITIL, which allows you to optimize the management of infrastructure based on Microsoft solutions. MOF 4.0 is currently released, based on ITIL 3.
SMF (Service Management Function)
It is the basis of MOF, which governs service management functions. The SMF provides guidance on how a company can achieve the required level of reliability, availability and manageability of IT solutions. SMF is built on the basis of many years of experience in IT management at Microsoft itself, as well as in thousands of its largest partners. Do not confuse SMF with MSF (Microsoft Solution Framework), which describes the planning and development of infrastructures.
In order to go through the planning of the future IT infrastructure, you must:
* analyze the organization’s business processes;
* audit the IT infrastructure (if it is planned to modernize the IT infrastructure or migrate to a new one);
* analyze the solutions, products, technologies available on the market and estimate the cost of their ownership (acquisition, operation, maintenance costs);
* calculate budgets and match opportunities with needs.
The result of the IT Infrastructure Planning Phase is an approved target architecture that meets the business needs in both efficiency and economic terms.
Any optimization of an IT infrastructure begins with an analysis that allows you to determine cost overruns according to certain criteria. Monitoring allows you to identify the following problems:
* Waste on software licensing and unused resources;
* Lack of standardization in the use of elements of the company’s infrastructure;
* The presence of outdated devices with a low level of efficiency and high operating costs;
* Inappropriate use of devices and resources;
* Lack of planning in organizing the work of networks and services.
After all the work has been completed, the infrastructure is put into pilot operation in order to test the work in production conditions, during which minor modifications are made and the project is handed over to the customer for operation or transferred to technical support for maintenance. You can learn more about IT infrastructure here – IT Outposts.
To carry out the analysis, it is necessary to involve IT specialists, simultaneously studying the cost items, as well as the format of the employees’ work. This is an important and time-consuming step in the process of which one or more direct optimization methods are identified.
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