Entrepreneur, technology evangelist, business strategist CEO, and Cofounder of Visartech Inc., a Software Product Development Agency.
Imagine you’re driving along the 8-lane highway, but it’s located in the countryside, and they’re only a few people who use it. This road is quite flat and convenient, but does it make sense? That’s right; there’s no need to have such a big road in the rural area—it’d rather be somewhere in a big busy city.
Business IT infrastructure is the same road you have to establish. By organizing and optimizing it right, you ensure the ever-efficient drive of your cars—parts of your IT ecosystem (servers, enterprise application software solutions, and data centers.) Additionally, allocating business budgets to meet real-existing needs.
The more efficient, stable and secure the IT infrastructure is, the better business operations are. Namely, your company software is flawlessly performing; therefore, server response time is quite fast, and all users’ requests are processed right away; your company’s data is highly protected—no loss or system downtime.
So let’s discuss the best practices powered by the DevOps approach that could help businesses optimize their IT infrastructure and, thereby processes.
- Embracing DevOps Agility
Living in a fast-moving world, the ability to quickly update and optimize your IT ecosystem brings your business a competitive advantage. To establish that agility and adaptability power, consider following DevOps-proven practices.
DevOps promotes the idea of continuous improvement and fast software delivery. That helps businesses always keep their IT infrastructure up-to-date, taking into account all the rising trends, needed updates, and new features.
Apart from that, DevOps practices involve cloud technology adoption, which in turn reduces manual work by automation. Based on DevOps report data, 33% of those surveyed say that DevOps helped them to automate the most repetitive tasks.
- Going For Сloud-Based Infrastructure
Cloud comes across as a proven standard for storing business data. Thus, 94% of enterprises worldwide regularly use cloud services. And it’s not surprising since the cloud can substantially reduce companies’ budgets while also providing enormous flexibility (no physical servers needed.)
For example, you have 500 employees that use your company software on a daily basis, but you start expanding the staff, which means more users. The cloud will dynamically increase the space to the precise scale you need.
Setting the business IT infrastructure in the cloud also allows for data loss prevention. Unlike an on-premise server, the cloud ensures data backup if there’s any system failure or outage.
- Making IT Ecosystem Secure
IT infrastructure serves as the backbone of your business. That means its security definitely accounts for the excellent performance of your company’s operations. And that’s why in the next three years, 76% of C-level executives intend to put most of their efforts into infrastructure security.
When securing your infrastructure, develop and apply cybersecurity policy tailored to your industry and business specifics. Make a point of doing DevOps penetration testing that will help you to see the overall picture of your company’s cyber resilience.
- Monitoring Overall Infrastructure Performance
Coming back to DevOps principles. One of them is to respond as quickly as possible when critical incidents occur. This involves having an incident management team who will regularly monitor your IT infrastructure 24/7.
The monitoring process is automated and is done continuously. The incident management team sets up a bunch of monitoring tools and alert systems. Then the team spots any bugs appearing and fixes them at once.
Apart from different issue prevention, infrastructure monitoring directly influences sales. Let’s take Amazon, making an average of $14,900 every second. In the case of downtime, even 20 seconds would have cost the company a fortune.
Paving Your Way To IT Infrastructure Optimization
By its nature, any system needs updates and improvements over time to keep everything in order. Infrastructure is no exception. And once you get down to IT infrastructure optimization, consider taking the next important steps.
• Conduct a comprehensive technical audit of the entire infrastructure and define the main system vulnerabilities and drawbacks.
• Create an IT infrastructure optimization plan that will include the workflow and the list of improvements to make.
• Launch the implementation of planned infrastructure refinement and maintain ongoing support.
As a result of making your IT infrastructure changes, your business and its IT ecosystem, in general, become more flexible, highly secure, and cost-efficient.
