These days IT is a critical component for any business that must operate faultlessly 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As the pressures and priorities of application management compete with corporate IT’s ability to build and manage the infrastructure these applications are built on, things can become a little increasingly challenging.
4 key challenges CIO’s face when managing information technology infrastructure
Challenge 1: Availability
Since IT budgets are typically limited, availability can be a challenge. If money was no object one cloud treat all applications as Tier Zero—mission critical—with redundant infrastructure standing by for instant recovery. But some applications just aren’t that crucial. If you have Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives of zero for your Tier 3 or Tier 4 applications, you’re overspending on availability. Conversely, if you’re only doing tape-based backup on those applications, you’re probably under-protecting them.
The ability to properly assess and manage the needs of every application on an ongoing basis is important to striking the right balance between availability and spending.
Challenge 2: Meeting the Budget
Even for healthy IT budgets, expenses all too often exceed funds. This makes it critical for IT assets to be consumed in the right way at the right time. In some cases, an owned asset is the most economically-efficient choice. Other times, a third-party cloud is the best option.
For example, you don’t want to buy 100 terabytes of storage when you need only 10 or 25 right now. Nor should you buy 15GB of RAM when you need five. In order to consume IT resources in a way that doesn’t result in over-purchasing, you must have a solid idea of what is in demand for the business at all times, and what might be necessary for future scalability.
Challenge 3: Agility
Application may not need to be in a high performance redundant environment during their development cycle but they may well need to be once they go onto production. The challenge for IT leaders is to shift that virtual workload from, say, a private cloud on their floor to a public cloud (and possibly back again) as needed.
Challenge 4: Control
To contend with all of these challenges, IT leaders have to know what they’re working with – and that’s no easy task. Mistakes with accounting for software usage can be devastating if one is audited for example. The reality is with ever-changing network, system, and application needs, many IT leaders don’t know what they really have—even when they think they do.
If you don’t have an accurate accounting of all your IT assets, you certainly don’t have control over them. Even for assets that are accounted for, something as simple as an out-of-date runbook can cause a recovery failure for example.
Conclusion:
None of these challenges is a matter of IT leaders not having expertise or talent. The challenges of managing IT infrastructure are all about having the bandwidth and process. In the chaotic environment of a highly-productive IT department, having a third party help with some of the complexity can ensure a smooth cost effective agile operation.
Our Managed Services and Cloud Products usually help companies remove CAPEX costs and reduce operational costs by more than 50% while leading to increased efficiency and productivity.
To learn more about the benefits of IT Managed Services click here or contact us
