You may be hearing business leaders in your company saying that IT Infrastructure has gotten easier in the last few years.  Certainly vendors, TV commercials, and airplane magazines tout that belief.

 

There are some incredible advances, like virtualization of every component and offerings like Co-lo sites and IaaS, Paas, and SaaS that weren’t viable 5-7 years ago.  Those are all great advances which have addressed availability issues and made financial alternatives available for IT infrastructure investment.  Yet if anything, these options  have made the IT Infrastructure leader’s role even more challenging. 

 

The most important concepts to keep in mind when making decisions about computing today are:

• What strategies will ensure your company’s long range goals ?

• What is the corporate strategy for financial planning?

• What are your company’s timeframes around making the changes needed?

 

After this information is clear, then the wide variety of offerings can be examined for their short-term and long-term viability.  Every vendor will tell you that they have the answer.  That is why the leader needs to develop their own clear, concise IT Infrastructure vision with high-level strategies before talking to vendors.

 

Clearly providing the information to the employees assigned to do the work needs to be the number one consideration, yet it can no longer be the only one.  The IT Infrastructure department of a company has so many impacts beyond providing the data to their employees.    These considerations include, but are not limited to”

• The Security of development, test, and production environments is now one of the number one topics on CEO’s and COO’s minds, not just the CIO’s mind.

• The type of environment that will ensure nimble application development is not the same as the type of environment which will suit the company wide production roll out of that same application.

• The ability for the outsourcer to meet not only this year’s needs for a company, but also their needs three years down the road is imperative to understand, since relocating data centers is a costly proposition.

• Where the data center (s) is run makes a difference to the office space lease agreements that the Real Estate department builds.

• A viable , as well as, a also needs to be considered in these decisions.

• In addition, these decisions substantially impact the IT Infrastructure staffing plan. 

 

WWC Ltd consulting can gather your Company’s goals and strategies and guide you through these questions so your decision meets your customer’s requirements today and tomorrow.  Contact WWC Ltd through this website or at Beth@TbyWWC.com.