A neglected legacy infrastructure is a serious threat to the business continuity of an organisation. Several issues combined (e.g. outdated hardware, low resilience and autonomy in the backup systems, poor maintenance and lack of proper BCP) can cause critical system failures and therefore significant financial and reputational losses.
Unfortunately, often times you need to wait for a major disruptive event to take place until the necessary remedial and corrective initiatives can be implemented, and a transformation strategy be planned.
IT as a Service (ITaaS)
A solution that could really help to solve many of the issues mentioned before is IT as a service (ITaaS): information technology delivered as a managed service with a clear IT services catalog and pricing associated with each of the catalog items.
The benefits to the business sought by using the ITaaS model include the standardization and simplification of products delivered by IT, improved financial transparency and more direct association of costs to consumption, and increased IT operational efficiency resulting from the need to compare the price of internally produced products to those available from external providers. The transformation of an internal IT organization from operating as a cost-center to an ITaaS model is also believed to produce improved levels of business agility for the enterprise as a whole (Wikipedia).
Transformation Initiatives
Improving a complicated and interconnected IT landscape will not be achieved by just running a single project, but, instead, by the combined efforts of different initiatives that tackle individual subjects, from improving existing maintenance processes to building a brand new platform, migrating away from your legacy hardware.
The Transformation Program could include subjects such as:
- Configuration Management Database (CMDB): reviewed and updated
- Patching: establishing routine and critical patching processes
- Virtualizing or Decommissioning (e.g. Solaris) outdated servers and hardware
- Improving Data Centre Maintenance processes, including UPS and backup systems
- Adding extra lines to connect to the internet (a new ISP or a WiFi route) in case your only connection to the outside world get compromised
- Resilient Data Centres: reviewing your resiliency capabilities, how would your systems cope if a building/cluster went offline, would it failover to another location? How would you recover? Should you add a new data centre location to add resiliency to your solution?
- Outsourcing to the cloud
- Emails (e.g. Outlook 365)
- Cloud Backups solution to enhance your DR capabilities and also reduce your costs
- Outsourcing your physical platform: what about a managed services contract where you no longer need to look after for your physical equipment, but instead hand it over to a professional firm, therefore giving away an expensive and complex cost centre?
- Service Desk and Ticketing systems integration with the managed service company
- Security review and best practices applied
Every organisation will have their own weak points and critical areas where focus and due diligence need to be undertaken in order to cover such gaps and improve their IT Systems.
Should you need any help in delivering your Transformation Journey, do not hesitate and Get In Touch Now!