Stay away from these most common IT infrastructure mistakes
Even in the most organized and well-managed companies, you will mostly find IT teams wearing many hats and they are often caught in the balancing act. They are left with no other choice than juggling between a long list of systems and then responding to fire drills they each present.
It doesn’t matter which industry you are dealing in, IT infrastructure management is defined by challenges faced by IT teams to manage and maintain data storage, servers, networks, and much more. That being said, all these aspects of IT infrastructure management have changed over the years and have widened the list of challenges IT teams used to deal with.
In all organizations, successful IT infrastructure management plays a crucial role in the growth of a company. When not managed properly or when managed without infrastructure operations management services, it leads to downtime. Any company can lose precious time and money due to such downtime.
The best way to avoid all these IT infrastructure mishaps is to identify the common IT mistakes and rule them out. So, let’s take a look at some common IT infrastructure management mistakes that can prove to be perpetrators of your firm’s growth and success.
Increasing challenges and complexities
There is no doubt that IT infrastructure has always been a complex topic to debate but over the past few decades, the IT infrastructure landscape has changed a lot. It has changed on such a level that the current IT infrastructure roadmaps and strategies might look like an alien concept to the IT professionals of yesterday.
The influx of support systems like Hubspot improves the interactivity throughout a business network but at the same time, they put more pressure on it in comparison to all the 1st generation systems which usually dealt with one-way traffic.
The increasing challenges and complexities are leaving companies with no other option than either building a team of IT experts or opting for infrastructure operation management services.
Even engineers are completely blank when it comes to automated systems like chatbots and businesses lack the required IT infrastructure to accommodate automation. In such circumstances, sticking with third-party IT infrastructure management seems fair.
Unstructured network
One thing you always have to keep in mind is network infrastructure is the backbone of any IT infrastructure. For any company to work properly and get the expected results, it needs to have a reliable and properly structured network. Although the network is always built with the right intentions and components, it is also the most overlooked part of IT infrastructure.
In most sites, equipment and cables are added and ad-hoc changes are made as a secondary task in the IT infrastructure management process. Furthermore, documentation is not properly maintained, and soon, even the most reliable IT infrastructure becomes the weakest link to IT success.
Another major issue is the introduction of low-speed switches cascades into low-speed switches. This reduces the entire speed of the IT infrastructure and makes it even more difficult to even access data warehouse data structures.
Increasing demand for security and availability
The growth of an IT infrastructure increases demands on the network. Although the traditional spoke and hub network model was quite effortless to maintain and manage, new-age models require quick deployment, fast actions, and up-to-date knowledge about every component. At the same time, engineers need to keep the IT infrastructure and its components like a cloud based incident management system safe from any type of cyber attack.
The increasing trend of remote networks has put more pressure on all the network admins to offer more network options while keeping the infrastructure safe. Because of this, IT engineers are left with no other option than using a bigger perimeter of SaaS programs delivered either through third-party solutions or the cloud.
Low data storage and availability
Cloud storage has slowly but steadily removed all the traditional storage methods and industries are no exception to this big shift in how data is now being stored. Although a cloud-based storage system proves to be a cost-effective and also scalable solution, it never offers the required data storage structure that can easily accommodate a long list of applications.
If a company will not have ample data storage capacity and if it fails to make the data available to authorized people on demand, it will never grow beyond a set limit. Even data warehouse data structures should be easy to access for all the businesses out there.
Lack of integration
The one thing that you will have to keep in mind is that one-in-all solutions are rarely ever genuinely available. Almost all the IT infrastructures that you will come across will be a basic amalgamation of different features and different services offered by other vendors. And every one of them is going to have its own interface and software used to manage them.
If there is a lack of integration, all the different solutions offered by the vendor according to your firm’s needs have to compromise on redundancy, feature, security, and so forth. This makes it a daunting task to build a completely custom-fit network. Such type of inflated infrastructure can lead to multiple overlaps where a similar security feature will be covered by different vendors leading to problems related to authentication.
The two things that companies need to focus on here are agility and flexibility. All the organizations out there need to adopt a network infrastructure that can cater to their specific needs and easily adapt whenever the needs change. This might require a solution based on Linux that can easily deal with multi-vendor environments and at the same time, can offer different options of customization.
Since IT infrastructure is the foundation of any successful business, business owners need to prioritize its management, security, updates, and so forth. If the existing IT engineers aren’t enough to deal with every aspect of IT infrastructure, you can hire third-party IT infrastructure management service providers and use the experience and expertise of seasoned IT professionals without actually hiring them.