It’s no secret that running IT within your business can be expensive. With IT costs and spending rising globally, a solid IT strategy that checks every box that a modern business needs is looking to be much more expensive for the average business than ever.
Optimising your business’ IT infrastructure can be one of the best ways to ensure that your organisation isn’t overspending on IT. After all, optimisation allows you to fine-tune your organisation’s usage and resources to ensure that you’re only spending on the resources that you actually need.
In this article, we’re going to go over the ins and outs of IT infrastructure optimisation, and how you can get started with IT infrastructure optimisation within your business right away.
What is Optimised IT Infrastructure?
To put it simply, IT infrastructure optimisation is the process of running your IT systems with the best possible balance of resources and capabilities for your organisation.
By optimising your IT infrastructure, you can ensure that your organisation is adequately equipped to handle the IT load of your organisation — while also ensuring that you’re not allocating resources where they are not required.
There are ways for each main part of your organisation’s IT infrastructure to be optimised, all of which will further help your organisation take control of its spending and ensure that every part of your IT infrastructure is adequately equipped to do its job while also not haemorrhaging costs —
- Infrastructure Hardware: Your company’s IT hardware will need optimising to ensure that the hardware is both adequate to meet the needs of your organisation while also not being exorbitantly expensive.
- Infrastructure Software: Your organisation’s software will need optimising to ensure that licence allocations aren’t higher than required — such as the number of licenses paid for, the capabilities and resources that the licenses grant, etc.
- Networking: Networking is becoming increasingly important for organisations worldwide, especially with the rise of the cloud and remote working. Networking works as a hybrid of both hardware and software, where bandwidth and capabilities are the core optimisation points — does your organisation need a certain number of routers? Do you need a certain bandwidth to complete your work? etc.
By consistently optimising your organisation’s IT infrastructure, you can generally ensure that your business is powerful and sustainable, meaning more future growth will always be possible.
How Optimised IT Infrastructure Improves Scalability
As your organisation grows, scalability becomes a massive factor in the capabilities of your business.
Scalability is your organisation’s ability to handle and accommodate increasing workloads, while also remaining sustainable and functional for your business as it grows into the future. Optimisation plays a key role in this — not only by growing your business — but also by accommodating your business’s growth to keep it sustainable in the long term.
Where optimisation ensures that your organisation’s infrastructure is efficient, scalability is the ability to increase the resources allocated within your infrastructure while still maintaining the same efficiency. This will allow your business to accommodate growth much more easily — in a manner that will never lose the momentum of efficiency gained by optimising your business’ infrastructure.
Key Considerations for Optimising IT Infrastructure
While every organisation is unique in the challenges and considerations that need to be made when thinking about optimisation, there are a few key considerations that need to be made when optimising your organisation —
- Complexity: Optimisation is a complex and strenuous process, which requires fine-tuning your organisation’s IT infrastructure regularly to ensure that the best possible balance is found — which will cause issues and possible system failure if done incorrectly.
- Knowledge: Knowing that your organisation needs to optimise to save costs is one thing. Figuring out what actually needs optimising requires lots of sifting through data and analytics to ensure that the right parts of your organisation are being optimised.
With this, it’s much easier to team up with a trusted partner that will be able to help you ensure that everything is done correctly — while also taking care of the lengthy optimisation process to allow you to focus on more important parts of your business.
Best Practices for IT Infrastructure Optimisation
Optimising your organisation’s IT infrastructure can be done in many different ways, which can leave you scratching your head as to which is the actual best way of doing it. So, let’s take a look at the best way to optimise your organisation’s IT infrastructure.
Audit: Auditing your organisation is the first key step in optimisation, as this will help you work out the results that optimisation can achieve. During this phase, you’ll need to find the reasons why optimisation is required and any detrimental effects it may have — to ensure you’re doing it for the right reasons.
Plan: As with anything, planning is a key step in ensuring that the whole process is undertaken correctly. Without a thorough plan to ensure every step of the process has been meticulously decided upon and considered, you risk your organisation falling into complete chaos.
Implementation: Implementation is the final step — putting the plan into action to undergo the process of optimisation will vary depending on your organisation, but will usually involve adjusting your infrastructure until you find the correct balance between resource allocation and requirement.
How Kontain Can Help
Optimisation is a key part of any growing business’s strategy to remain sustainable into the future — and grow to unlock their full potential.
By optimising costs and enabling scalability within your organisation, you’ll be able to ensure that your organisation isn’t overspending on IT infrastructure, which could allow you to allocate those resources to parts of your business that do need them.
If you’re looking into IT infrastructure optimisation and need a helping hand, reach out to us today. Our experts are here to help you along the way and will help you optimise your organisation’s IT infrastructure so you can focus on the pressing matters within your business. Get in touch with us now and see how we can help.
