There are many ways to improve your home. You can add on to your house, giving you more functionality or space to grow into. You can remodel your house, changing key components or the layout to suit your evolving needs. You can completely raze your house and build a new one that has everything you want.
Of course, each of these comes with downsides that must be taken into consideration. When adding on to your house, for example, there is impact not only to the living space, but also to the outside of the house where the addition will sit. Your yard may be torn up for months, inviting dirt and mud to be tracked all through the house.
When remodeling your house, you may experience seemingly endless noise, dust, and strangers in your home. When razing your home, you must find somewhere else to live during demolition and construction.
Considering these downsides, there is another way to improve your house, and it also applies to your IT infrastructure: You can refresh your house in place.
We find that there are many reasons to refresh your IT infrastructure, but the most pressing include:
- Security issues
- Cloud readiness
- Business transformation
- Network rationalization
In this post, we’ll spend a bit of time on each of these ways to refresh your IT infrastructure without adding on to it, remodeling it, or razing it.
Security issues
Security is one of the fastest growing IT focus areas for most organizations. There are an ever-growing number of security vendors who all claim to have the right product to make sure your infrastructure is secure. What we have learned about security is that bolting on technologies is the wrong approach. Building protective measures into the complete design of your IT infrastructure is the best way to ensure its security. And then, developing an orchestration capability that manages the alerting, analysis, and reporting of the overall security architecture is key. There are many technologies available. Navigating them all takes experience and capabilities that are not always present in organizations.
Cloud readiness
Cloud and hybrid cloud readiness is a hot topic in today’s business world. Being cloud ready means lots of different things to many people. At NetCraftsmen, we believe that being cloud ready means that you have a strategy to connect with and implement cloud technology; that you have addressed outstanding issues with your current IT infrastructure that may prevent you from successfully implementing a cloud solution such as DNS; and that you have evaluated all the costs required to enable your IT infrastructure to take advantage of cloud technologies.
Business transformation
Business transformation is one of the hottest buzz words in the industry today, and the phrase reflects what is happening across many industries. We have all read about the Uberization of the taxi industry or the Amazoning of the retail industry. There are many, many examples of disruption caused by new business models. We believe that organizations need to plan to disrupt themselves; that there are ways to drive capabilities and technologies into your organization to change how you do business; that you can build new and better relationship with your customers; and that you can leverage technology to accomplish all of this — when you start with a business strategy.
Network rationalization
Network rationalization efforts are fundamental to refreshing your IT infrastructure, rather than continuing to add on to your network, remodeling it, or razing it to build a new one. We believe that a rational approach to leveraging technologies and capabilities, such as Software Defined Networking (SDN), is a better approach than extending or redesigning your existing network. And, we don’t know many organizations that could survive razing their current network to build a new one.
These areas are all complex. And, they often overlap each other from a technology and capability perspective. Having the right partner who can help you navigate your way through all the choices is key. To learn more about improving your IT infrastructure, reach out.