For today’s companies, having an effective, productive, and efficient IT infrastructure is more important than ever. With technology playing a greater role in almost every aspect of running a business, this is not an area you can afford to overlook.
Failing to take your IT efficiency seriously can have numerous negative and lasting effects — opening up your organization to issues with connectivity, productivity, and security with potentially devastating impacts.
So what can you do to increase the efficiency of your IT infrastructure? In this article, we’ll look at why IT infrastructure is so important and some of the ways you can maximize its efficiency.
What Is IT Infrastructure?Â
IT infrastructure refers to the many different processes, technologies, systems, facilities, and strategies that underpin your organization’s IT operations.
It includes things like security, data management, end-user functions, storage, and everything else that works together to allow you to safely deliver your business operations and meet your objectives.
How Does IT Infrastructure Impact Your Efficiency?
The efficiency of your organization depends on your IT infrastructure in several key ways. Here are some of the key impacts:
- Improved productivity and reduced friction. A well-functioning IT infrastructure allows you to manage key processes more successfully and smoothly, allowing your teams to quickly access the resources and information they need to maximize productivity and minimize delays and errors.
- Better security. Security is a critical element of IT infrastructure, and the more secure your organization is, the less risk of data breaches, downtime, and costly delays.
- Easier access to and management of data. By accessing and managing your organization’s data more easily, you can tap into powerful insights, avoid blind spots, and perform a wide range of tasks more efficiently and successfully.
On the other hand, an inadequate or poorly managed IT infrastructure can come with a host of problems. Your connectivity can suffer, leading to major delays and crashes in productivity, and security failures can lead to catastrophic breaches and even legal issues.
How Can You Improve Your IT Infrastructure?
Now that we know what’s at stake, how can organizations improve and maintain their IT infrastructure? Let’s explore some key best practices here.
- Invest in the right tools. Your IT infrastructure is only as good as the technologies underpinning it. This includes hardware like routers and servers, software tools like a CRM, and security techniques like endpoint detection and response (EDR). Take the time and allocate the resources to ensure you have all the right tools in place to meet your needs and drive greater efficiency.Â
Take IT maturity seriously. IT maturity goes hand in hand with a more efficient and functional IT infrastructure. Focus on building a more digitally mature organization — by establishing the right processes, implementing proper end-user functions, and making security a priority — and a more efficient infrastructure will almost certainly follow suit.
- Focus on security. Security is an essential factor when it comes to driving efficiency. Without the right security systems and strategies in place, your organization is at greater risk of cyber attacks and data breaches, which can significantly derail your operations, lead to lengthy periods of downtime, and cost enormous sums of money.
- Track the right metrics. Monitoring the relevant metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) allows you to gain insights into your IT infrastructure’s performance and the steps you can take to improve your efficiency. KPIs to pay attention to include latency, error rates, and throughput. You should also look at security metrics like policy adherence rate and mean time to resolve.
By knowing the importance of and laying the groundwork for a solid IT infrastructure, you can set your organization on the right path. Because technology is always changing, though, it’s not enough to simply improve your infrastructure — you also have to maintain it and have a concrete plan for handling IT infrastructure changes as needed going forward.
How to Handle Implementing Changes in IT Infrastructure
Now let’s explore some of the key steps you can take to implement the above practices in your organization.
Carry out an Assessment & Get Clear on Key Processes
The first step should be to conduct a thorough assessment of your IT infrastructure. This can be done internally or with the help of a third-party partner. Your assessment should aim to review your current infrastructure, identify any weak points that could be holding back efficiency, and make some concrete prescriptions on how to move forward and make your IT infrastructure more efficient.
As a result, you should be able to identify and outline the key processes that make up your IT infrastructure — things like change management, asset management, and various security processes. Knowing where you need to focus your efforts will allow you to set more useful goals.
Align Your Teams
If you want to build a more efficient IT infrastructure, you’ll need the buy-in and support of all the members of your organization.
It’s essential to make sure everyone is aligned and knows their individual roles within the overall project. Creating clear documents and roadmaps to share with your teams, along with regular meetings where questions and feedback are encouraged, can make this process easier.
Prepare for an Ongoing Process & Work With an Expert
Improving your IT infrastructure is a continuous process without a defined finish line. It’s important to acknowledge this from the beginning of your journey and approach each of your goals with this mindset. If the lack of a finish line intimidates you, consider working with an expert.
Building a more efficient, secure, and productive IT infrastructure is much easier when you enlist the help of seasoned experts. At DYOPATH, we’ve helped countless organizations improve immediate IT issues and maintain a sustainable, robust IT infrastructure well into the future.
If you want to maximize your organization’s IT infrastructure but don’t know where to start, contact us today to learn how DYOPATH can help.
