It’s the middle of the year. How is your infrastructure holding up to the IT challenges your business is facing in 2019? An infrastructure assessment can help you determine where your infrastructure fails to meet these important needs:

• Computing power. Enough CPU cycles, memory, and storage to execute software with the performance the business needs is a basic requirement that gets tougher to meet every year as the software becomes more complex and data increases in volume. Cloud computing is one way to potentially access adequate capacity, but other solutions should be considered as well.
• Cybersecurity. Implementing effective information security solutions is a growing challenge due to increased public awareness and regulations such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation and the upcoming California Consumer Privacy Act.
• Network performance. All those cybersecurity tools can cause packet losses and other disruptions and delays in delivering data. The effective network can degrade to the point where it’s visible to end users and impacts their collaborative work efforts.
• Big data. The IT challenges of big data include storage and accessibility, as well as analytics applications. For most businesses, the idea that there’s value in every byte of data is seductive but it’s still difficult to actually extract that value.
• Virtualization. Making effective use of servers requires virtualization. This introduces new management challenges, including encryption and backups. In addition, virtualization can be applied to networks as well as servers, adding complexity to network management.
• Management and oversight. It’s difficult for a single management tool to effectively consolidate the status of infrastructure that’s distributed across multiple clouds and data centers, yet tools that focus on a single environment don’t provide a comprehensive picture of your status. Metrics will help you both manage your existing infrastructure and support the case you present to the business for IT projects and new infrastructure.
• Mobility management. Many businesses rely on employees who BYOD, using their personal mobile devices to perform their jobs. Unless you take appropriate measures, such as using mobile device management software, those devices are not under the business’s control and can present security risks.

In order to succeed, the plan to satisfy those needs must align with the business’s strategic priorities. This is both a communications challenge and a budgeting problem. Making the case for technology changes is more effective if you can find a low-cost solution or one that will reduce your ongoing expenses in the future. Showing how IT changes reduce business risks is another tactic that can lead to technology project approval.

One additional challenge IT teams face is the complexity of their environment and the difficulty of finding skilled professionals to support it. Working with an IT consulting and managed services firm like Prescient Solutions gives your business access to certified experts in all these challenging aspects of technology. Contact us to learn how we can help you assess your infrastructure and implement a plan to ensure your technology supports your business effectively.