How Efficient is Your Infrastructure?

Businesses considering a move to the cloud take many factors into consideration. They may want to make their operations more agile, reduce their costs, increase scalability or improve mobile and remote access to applications and services for employees and customers.

In some cases, the driving factors may be closer to home — existing infrastructure can no longer cope with demands from the business for greater availability, faster delivery of new services or the requirements of digital transformation.

Identifying Efficiency Levels

Research commissioned by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) found that 25 percent of app development time is spent waiting for infrastructure to be available, while more than a third of IT teams overprovision their infrastructure to ensure availability.

Analysis by IDC for HPE clarified the problems and indicated that traditional data center infrastructure is generally inefficient. According to the research, only 45 percent of available capacity is provisioned for the machines running applications.

Utilization also runs at 45 percent based on idle compute time and unused storage capacity. Agility, based on the time taken to change or provision new compute and storage instances, is lower at just 30 percent. And, compliance with SLAs is typically around 40 percent.

Despite the challenges, data center infrastructure remains important — HPE also found that more than 60 percent of CIOs had brought workloads back from the cloud to the data center.

Time for Professional Assessment

Given the continuing importance of the data center, a thorough assessment by specialists is essential.

Hiring a professional infrastructure specialist can free the IT team from the repetitive tasks and provide the business with comprehensive, up-to-date information on the infrastructure. Infrastructure assessment professionals specialize in this task. They have developed the right skills and best practice, and they utilize tools to improve speed and accuracy.

Specialist brings the right combination of skills to assess all aspects of the infrastructure. They combine data center, infrastructure, network and security skills to ensure no aspect is overlooked. As well as keeping vendor certification up to date, infrastructure assessment specialists also follow best practice in the assessment process or in specific technologies.

To improve efficiency, professionals develop comprehensive processes to ensure they cover all aspects of the assessment. They have documented procedures for data collection, processing, analysis and reporting.

Specialist firms like VTG have developed tools to improve the speed and accuracy of information reporting. These automated tools can reduce the time taken to carry out the assessment and improve accuracy.

VTG’s ZENfra tool, for example, reduces the complexity of data capture. It collects data from log files, processes the data and provides a series of customized reports for different stakeholders. These automated tools reduce the risk of human error and provide an accurate basis for assessment.

From Assessment to Action

Following the assessment, IT teams will have comprehensive information to make decisions about their infrastructure. They may decide to make improvements to existing infrastructure, rather than opt for cloud migration. Or, they may decide to deploy a hybrid infrastructure that utilizes elements of cloud and on-premise.

Whatever the direction, identifying and implementing infrastructure improvements can help IT teams deliver a better service to users, reduce complexity, increase staff productivity and lower TCO.

Find Out More

If you would like to find out more about our infrastructure assessment services, please check out the articles and infographics on our website.