Title: General Article
Author: Ben Educator
Company:

Infrastructure is a long term capital investment, with most equipment having a life span of 3 to 10 years. Strategic planning is necessary to ensure that the infrastructure meets the current and the future business needs, considering the rapidly changing technology environment. So, there are two things that drive this strategic planning: (1) business needs of the organization and (2) technological changes.

It is interesting to note that even of the business needs of the organization remain constant (which they don’t most of the time), obsolescence and technological changes require planning for infrastructure replacements, additions or subtractions. For example, newer technology may make it cheaper to purchase and maintain a newer server than retain an older server. Technologies like virtualization enable multiple applications running on different operating systems to make use of the same server, especially when the server is has a newer, faster central processing unit, larger memory and higher network and storage bandwidth. Such newer servers can be used to consolidate and replace two or more older servers. When the maintenance costs of these older servers are greater than the purchase cost of the newer server, it becomes financially and operationally expedient to take this approach.

Technological changes often make older systems obsolete or in some cases make it expensive to continue to make changes to the software running on the older systems. In such cases, there is an added software development cost to replace the older system with a newer system. Even so, it may turn out that such a change is beneficial, when one considers the whole set of organizational costs, such as the cost of recruiting and training employees, and the loss of business opportunities.

Finally, the technological environment may present an entire different opportunity – such as cloud computing. If suitable cloud computing environments become available, organizations may be able to eliminate portions of their infrastructure and choose to run applications in the cloud using a cloud provider. Some large organizations are running their email systems in the cloud and some large software vendors are themselves offering cloud solutions. No doubt, organizations will be concerned about security; but if suitable security measures are implemented by the cloud providers, organizations may warm up to clouds more and more over time.

Blog Article 29 - Strategic Planning for IT Infrastructure.doc