Infrastructure Assessment – a Critical Foundation for Digital Transformation
Digital transformation will put new demands of speed, performance, resilience, reach and scale on your infrastructure. Your users and customers will have high expectations of a service that is easy to and always available from any location, particularly if they already have experience of cloud applications and services. And, the infrastructure must be capable of supporting innovation and delivering new services rapidly. That makes infrastructure assessment a key element of any digital transformation initiative.
The assessment has to answer a number of important questions:
- Is the current IT and network infrastructure in a healthy state?
- Will it be able to handle the speed, performance and resilience required for transformation?
- Is it capable of scaling to bring news locations and new users on board quickly or respond rapidly to changing business or market requirements?
- What is required to bring current capability up to the required standards for digital transformation?
- Will the changes require upgrades, new investment or migration to a different platform such as cloud?
Changing Landscape
An infrastructure assessment increases visibility and understanding by providing a detailed inventory as well as a valuable healthcheck. It also highlights gaps in your existing infrastructure and provides an accurate basis for planning the infrastructure upgrade.
The new infrastructure must be able to support the requirements of a changing workplace. It must enable your users to work remotely on a range of different desktop and mobile devices. It should provide the connectivity to allow employees, customers, suppliers and other partners to collaborate easily from any location on any device. And it must support cloud deployment so that users can access applications, data and services securely at any time from any location.
Scope of the Assessment
An infrastructure assessment should cover the following areas:
IT assets – By discovering and analyzing the hardware and software Inventory and their dependencies, you can obtain a detailed picture of your asset lifecycle. Which assets will form part of the new infrastructure and which ones will have to be retired or replaced?
Network infrastructure – Your network provides the vital basis for connectivity. Can it support mobile and remote working? Does it have the speed, security and scalability to meet the demands of a digital enterprise? Are your Internet connections reliable and secure? Does your WAN have the speed and capacity to support local sites effectively and can it easily scale to add new sites?
Data center infrastructure – An infrastructure assessment gives you the opportunity to assess your overall data center strategy. Will your current infrastructure support the apps and services required for digital transformation or will you have to migrate to the cloud? Which parts of the infrastructure need to remain on site to support mission critical applications or applications subject to regulatory compliance? This part of the assessment can help you plan an effective data center migration strategy.
Speed the Assessment
The infrastructure assessment must be based on accurate, up-to-date information. Manual infrastructure assessments are time-consuming and subject to human error. If you need support to handle your assessment, VTG can provide a professional infrastructure assessment service, using its patented tool, ZENfraTM which automates and speeds up the assessment process.
Our experienced consultants use proven methods and tools like ZENfra to assess the efficiency, cost, and performance of your infrastructure. This can help you develop a flexible, optimized infrastructure that is highly scalable and responsive to the changing business and technical needs of your digital transformation.
Find Out More
If you would like to know more about our infrastructure assessment services, please check out the articles and infographics on our website.