IT Infrastructure Management

Infrastructure is a very generic term that means foundation or base in general. In the IT context this is often used to collectively refer to people, processes, technology and the organisation involved in delivering the service. Unlike a product, the quality of a service is determined not when it is conceptualised but when it is actually delivered to the end customer. As more and more businesses start delivering "services" rather than products, it becomes important for them to ensure that the underlying infrastructure delivers ideal performance always. For example there are a number of things that work in tandem to deliver services like online filing of IT returns, purchase of rail/airline tickets, etc. If a customer decides to purchase a product and cannot get the right information on the product when he is looking for it, it means lost sales or revenues for the company. So it becomes extremely important even for companies, that just supply product information to customers, leave alone e-commerce companies, to maintain very high uptimes.

Worldwide companies are realising that the key to not losing business is to get closer to five nines availability by managing the IT infrastructure professionally. There are a number of companies, which specialize in just offering infrastructure management services to its customers.

While most of the organisations have the technology and people, the weakness in the infrastructure stems from the lack of well-oiled processes. Typically the teams managing the technology have very limited understanding of the business objectives and the service requirements. This results in poor quality of development, long time to resolve problems and a chaotic operations environment because of the constant gap between the service requirement and the understanding of the requirements. This directly impacts the quality of service to the end customer.

IT infrastructure management as a concept has caught on rapidly for one more reason, the need for delivering services cost effectively. As more and more CIOs face the challenge of having to deliver more with the same IT budget, they turn to infrastructure management to see where they can get more out of the existing resources. Processes like capacity management provide valuable information to the management on the processing capacity that is available and what the utilisation trend has been. Based on this information in some cases it can be simple to avoid capital expenditure by just swapping the roles of two components, where one component is under utilised and is of higher capacity and the other is over utilised and of lower capacity.

The term infrastructure management may make things sound a little more complex than what it is and may look like a daunting task.

While I would not say it is too simple either, a systematic approach to infrastructure management can make things easier to implement and follow. The first step to infrastructure management is to inventory the infrastructure and gather relevant performance data from the infrastructure using tools like element managers and network management software. Once the performance data is available, applying performance tolerance limits helps identify potential problems. Several service providers who provide monitoring and reporting services can also provide the process framework required for managing the infrastructure on an ongoing basis.

Once all of the above is in place within the company, I am sure there will be a lot of opportunities for improvement that will present itself to the CIO and also help in greatly improving the quality of services.

- CR Narayanan