Right-Sizing IT Infrastructure

Technology changes constantly.  Literally, as I write this article, some new piece of hardware or software is being created or updated to radically change the way some common process currently functions today.  This can be scary for business technology leaders or champions.  They may have just convinced their company to invest large sums of money in what was bleeding edge technology yesterday, but today has been downgraded to leading edge technology and tomorrow could even be yesterday’s technology.

The answer to this dilemma is not simple but it consists of right-sizing your infrastructure for your business today and for your growth tomorrow.  Many vendors will tell you that right-sizing means buying the latest and greatest when this is most often not the case.  Building the correct infrastructure is actually as much of a business process as it is a technology choice.  Through my years of IT experience, I have found many companies often fall on the lower or higher ends of the technology spectrum.  This ranges from the small business that tries to run everything virtualized on one server to the medium-sized business that spends themselves out of profits by buying the latest blade center or hyper converged solution of which they only use a fraction of the purchased horsepower.  The best solutions usually fall somewhere in the middle. Select a solution which can handily tackle your technology needs today and in your projected future, while also having the ability to easily scale up should your projections turn out to be on the low side. Making this choice isn’t something you have to do alone and it shouldn’t be a battle of your budget against your vendor’s profits.

This is where the role of a trusted adviser comes in.  Many of the years I have worked in IT have been spent working for managed services companies and being a trusted adviser for our clients.  When you partner with a vendor agnostic trusted adviser you are making your technology choices a little bit easier.  A good trusted adviser can use the many tools at their disposal to perform a detailed analysis of your current infrastructure and offer solutions which can utilize some of your existing technology and bring in new technology that won’t break your budget and won’t let you down.  Today this solution will often times include some cloud component and will also usually be a hybrid of hardware and software technology you will own or lease. The environment can then be intermingled with dynamically adjustable cloud resources which will let the more dynamic portions of your infrastructure grow and shrink with the changes in demand.   This solution allows a business to control their costs, only incurring higher costs when their business demands it and their revenue can support it.