Infrastructure optimization is a planned, methodical process developed by Microsoft for evaluating an organization’s IT infrastructure and application platform across capabilities in order to propose an optimization roadmap toward a Dynamic IT. The roadmap assists businesses in defining and putting into action optimization projects that will enable proactive IT management and result in cost and risk savings across the IT organization. In order to boost productivity and magnify the impact of personnel, these optimization activities also improve user needs and experience. Optimization enables a business to achieve the full benefit of its IT infrastructure and platform investments and establishes IT as strategic business assets that may facilitate innovation and help businesses respond rapidly to change.
Microsoft has created three optimization models based on market and analyst research in order to assist clients in evaluating the efficacy and potential of their IT infrastructure and application platform, foster agility, and lower costs. The Optimization models are vendor-neutral, and all of the initial inquiries concern general technologies rather than particular items. There are three ways to look at optimization:
- Basic Facilities
- Infrastructure for Business Productivity
- Platform for applications
Why Is Cloud Infrastructure Optimization Significant?
Evaluation of an organization’s workload patterns, including usage, historical data, and operating costs, is facilitated by cloud infrastructure optimization. It then helps to combine this knowledge with the understanding of readily accessible cloud services and configurations to make recommendations that aid in better workload-to-service matching.
The best method to maximize an organization’s cloud infrastructure is to spend money on managed cloud services. Partnering with the appropriate managed service provider (MSP) can assist the business not only maintain its infrastructure secure but also optimize costs and time so that it can concentrate more on operational results.
Today, organizations and companies are facing a lot of problems with their money expenditure and investment. But how to solve this problem? How to address this issue?
For this, it is important to use a well-defined and adequate strategy for IT infrastructure optimization that will help them from over or under-investment. But, it is very difficult to choose the correct approach for optimization of your IT infrastructure. It is a very important yet challenging task.
You must have a technology partner having sufficient experience that will help you in designing, planning, and implementing a well-planned IT infrastructure optimization strategy.
So here we are with this paper, which will discuss the benefits of IT infrastructure optimization. It also provides its readers with ways the optimization of IT infrastructure, and many more.
IT Infrastructure Optimization: 3 Key Types
There can be three possible ways of IT infrastructure optimization that are mentioned below
On-Premise Infrastructure Optimization
In such a type of optimization, you are not doing the transfer of applications to the cloud. When it comes to on-premises infrastructure optimization, companies usually choose to cut down the number of their data center machinery. They may reduce the number of processors and opt for using processors having lesser memory and power like having 4 cores instead of 8 or higher. Now, this is a wrong approach and it can bring a lot of challenges to the companies.
Now, before you do the optimization of the IT infrastructure of your on-premises infrastructure, you must ascertain that it is capable of landing the work or data overload. You must employ the correct set of strategies for the optimization of your on-premises infrastructure.
Optimizing Cloud Infrastructure
Optimization of cloud infrastructure means maximizing the performance, minimizing waste, and assigning the right resources or the right application to the right platform. We all know that every cloud has its unique infrastructure. So optimization in such a scenario is also quite challenging. In such a situation, inadequate means of optimization can lead to the risk of system failure.
So for the optimization of your cloud infrastructure, you must have a solution that allows the running of the cloud on demand. So you can stop and start the infrastructure whenever you want to automatically.
Optimization By Migration From On-Premises To The Cloud
Migration from on-premises to the cloud is a very common practice of companies for better performance and efficiency. Many companies are adopting this technique for their large data and applications and they have already shifted to the cloud. As it helps you in saving of a lot of things and expenses.
There can be many approaches to cloud migration and there is not only one. There are multiple options for cloud services. There are so many benefits offered by cloud migration that is why companies prefer to shift from their on-premises to the cloud.
HOW TO OPTIMIZE IT INFRASTRUCTURE: KEY STEPS
We have already discussed the three ways of IT infrastructure optimization now we will talk about the stages of optimization of IT infrastructure. There are three important stages of optimization of IT infrastructure. These three stages are mentioned below in detail.
i. Audit
The first stage is known as the audit. It is a very crucial stage of the optimization of IT infrastructure. In this stage, you have to think and comprehend the possible results of optimization. In this stage, you have to find out why you are opting for optimization. What can be the after-effects of it and how will it help you and the operations of your company?
Now this stage is divided into two categories depending on whether you are doing on-premises infrastructure optimization or cloud infrastructure optimization.
• On-premise audit:
Now for such a scenario, your success lies in the fact that how well you know your system. For the success of on-premises infrastructure optimization, you should know your system very well and how much capacity and machinery you have in your data center. What do you are having and what you are lacking? You must know all this at this stage.
• Cloud audit:
Now it is much more complicated than the earlier one, as in this case, you should have an experienced team of experts for doing a thorough audit. You need a team for doing the analysis of your infrastructure and telling you what you need and what you are lacking.
Now once this stage is completed you are ready to move to the next stage which is the planning stage.
ii. Planning
The second stage is the planning stage. Now once you are done with the audit stage you move to this stage. As we know there can be various ways to optimization of IT infrastructure, so we have more criticality in this stage.
Planning On-Premise Infrastructure Optimization
The main approach for the optimization of IT infrastructure is to decrease your memory capacity and the number of machines in your data center. When it comes to on-premises infrastructure optimization, these ways are the best to use mostly.
Planning Cloud Infrastructure Optimization
For the optimization of cloud infrastructure, adopting the correct approach and strategy is very important. You have to adopt an approach that brings you the most benefits and advantages. So you must think over all such possibilities and how to implement them. You must have a team of experts for doing the related tasks.
iii. Implementation
Now, this is the last stage, known as the implementation stage. As the name suggests here you will implement your selected approaches and strategies for the optimization of IT infrastructure.
On-Premise Optimization:
In this stage, the approach for the optimization of the IT infrastructure that you apply decreases your memory capacity and reduces the number of machines in your data center. This is the most common way of implementing optimization of your on-premises infrastructure.
Cloud Optimization:
Now for cloud infrastructure optimization, there can be six possible ways of implementation. These are
iv. Re-Hosting
It is the simplest one. It does not require any coding so no effort is wasted on coding thus, time is saved. But for a longer perspective, this method is having a few performance issues.
v. Re-Plat Forming
In this method, you have to do some adjustments and variations as per the need of the cloud to improve your landscape.
vi. Modernizing
It is like the other methods, but it requires the effort for coding as it is necessary for this method.
vii. Rewriting
The method is a complex one as it involves the transformation of the application involving the conversion of a monolith to microservices decomposition.
viii. Drop And Shop
In this method, you purchase the solutions, if the cloud is poor so that you can increase your performance.
ix. Retaining
In this method, you keep things as they are and do not introduce variations in your landscape and you do not make adjustments in your system.
There is no doubt in the fact that IT infrastructure optimization is accompanying a lot of benefits. But we cannot deny that there are some challenges on this path as well. So we will discuss the challenges along with the possible ways for overcoming those challenges as well.
It Infrastructure Optimization: Challenges And Best Practices
1. On-Premise Optimization Challenges:
The most tricky or difficult task is an elaborated analysis when it comes to on-premises optimization. Because in such type of optimization you are not doing the transfer of applications to the cloud. So to do this task, you must have a detailed understanding and a better strategy for the execution of the task.
2. Cloud Infrastructure Optimization Challenges:
We all know that every cloud has its unique infrastructure. So optimization in such a scenario is also quite challenging. In such a situation, inadequate means of optimization can lead to the risk of system failure.
In both the situations mentioned above, it is possible to address the challenges. All you need is a trusted and experienced technology partner that will help you in designing, planning, and implementing a well-planned IT infrastructure optimization strategy.
Businesses That Benefit From It Infrastructure Optimization
Several businesses are gaining benefits from IT infrastructure optimization. The two most famous ones are given below
1. Lebara
Lebara is considered the fastest-growing mobile virtual network operator in Europe. It has millions of consumers, with employees from about 62 nationalities globally. It is operating in six countries. It is getting a lot of benefits from IT infrastructure optimization such as reducing the cost of infrastructure, better innovation, and faster delivery service to the clients.
How 0scale Help You For Infrastructure Optimization?
0scale analyses the data infrastructure of the clients. It audits the used data and processes the different types of data. It has a team of experts that are responsible for doing these tasks. They do the auditing, processing, and implementation of necessary procedures. 0scale had built its architecture design in such a way that it is adequate to fulfill the needs of the clients. It is cost-effective and can analyze a huge sum of data. 0scale integrated technologies for infrastructure optimization services.It also incorporated Kerberos for providing network authentication to its clients.
2. Canadian Online Brokerage
This is another example of businesses that are getting benefits from IT infrastructure optimization. This is also a well-known company and it leverages technology for lowering fees. This company uses this technology as it provides a better alternative compared to the conventional options for financial investment.
To conclude, in this article we discussed the benefits of IT infrastructure along with the ways of IT infrastructure optimization. This paper also the challenges faced by the adoption of this technology and the successful businesses that are gaining benefits from IT infrastructure optimization.
Hope we can deliver the information in an easy, clear, and precise manner. Hope it helped you!