With so many great ways to augment your enterprise’s operations with technology, it’s easy to lose sight of the essentials. It is the CIO’s responsibility to make sure that innovations in hardware, software, and networking don’t distract your administrator’s focus from the basic, pragmatic features that are most valuable to your business.

As you develop your organization’s computing infrastructure, it’s important to make sure that you’re laying a solid foundation that will stand the test of time. That might seem intimidating at first glance. However, with a few basic principles in mind, you can build out your infrastructure with confidence.

Why Do You Need Infrastructure Design Principles?

Before you implement anything, it’s important to understand the why behind it. Why exactly is it so critical to utilize IT infrastructure design best practices when it comes to your company’s unique needs? 

For starters, a systemized and strategic plan is much more likely to succeed than sporadic decision-making and knee-jerk reactions. It’s not always easy to predict what the future will hold. Although we can make educated guesses, there will inevitably be surprises. A robust computing infrastructure must be able to scale as you grow so that your systems can adapt to evolving business needs and weather unexpected events such as network outages. 

On top of that, data protection is more important than ever in today’s digital world. Cyberattacks are on the rise and bad actors learn new tricks every day. An infrastructure that isn’t built with these concerns in mind could open your company up to costly vulnerabilities, resulting in major downtime and financial loss.

Keeping best practices in mind also ensures that you’re able to build a system that is as high-performing and efficient as possible. 

The 10 Essentials To Remember

Here are ten of the most essential infrastructure design elements that you should keep in mind when constructing your organization’s computing infrastructure, both in the present and far into the future.

1) IT Infrastructure Needs Assessment

What does your enterprise’s infrastructure need to function with optimal efficiency? A comprehensive network audit that includes a measurement of the degrees of usage each component gets is essential to managing the return you will get on your technology investments.

2) Hardware as a Service (HaaS)

One of the biggest pain points of enterprises is investing in new hardware, even though it will just have to be replaced again in a few years anyway. In an attempt to shore up the large up-front cost of doing so, many managed IT service providers offer Hardware as a Service. HaaS is designed to allow enterprises more affordable ways to replace dysfunctional hardware through the use of affordable monthly payments.

3) Network Design, Device Configuration, Rollout, and Optimization

If you’re hosting your infrastructure on-premise, adding new hardware can be a major pain. Of course, you’ll want to have a complete cabling infrastructure planned out before installing the new hardware. Cabling is tough to redo if it’s not done right the first time, so you will want to make sure that you get things right initially to avoid headaches and additional costs.

4) Complete Cabling and Physical Connectivity

While in the process of connecting all of your endpoints to your enterprise’s infrastructure, make sure that any and all workstations, servers, or other hardware that needs to be connected, has been.

5) Server and Storage Consolidation

If your organization has servers that are being underutilized, you can consolidate them to ensure that you’re getting the best return on investment. Servers are expensive and resource-intensive to run and maintain, so you might be surprised by how much your enterprise can save by virtualizing and consolidating your computing resources.

6) Virtualization, Clustering, and Load Balancing

While on the topic of server consolidation, virtual servers are great ways to avoid overloading a physical server unit. Virtual servers offer opportunities to isolate and run legacy apps, which is a unique advantage that could make all of the difference if you rely on older software.

7) Email and IP Telephony

Where are you hosting your communications solutions? Are they a part of your on-site infrastructure, or are they deployed through a cloud-based solution? Either way, it’s important to keep in mind the internal bandwidth of doing such a thing, as well as what happens to your business if your vendor’s cloud solution goes down.

8) Manage Print Services

Printers don’t always come into the conversation when thinking about infrastructure. You need to plan ahead for copiers and printers. If you don’t, they could become a liability that makes something as simple as printing a receipt an issue.

9) Disaster Recovery Solutions

Do you have a plan in the event of a major disaster? You should be storing backups of your data in multiple locations both on-site, off-site, and in the cloud for rapid recovery.

10) On-Premise to Cloud Migration

How much effort will it take to move your data infrastructure to the cloud? Moving an on-site network to the cloud offers several benefits to enterprises, including increased access, permissions management, and much more.

5 Things To Address Before Deploying

Although these ten design elements are a great starting place, there are a few more things to address that will help tailor your framework. The answers to these questions will be unique to your business and equally important for determining a successful infrastructure design strategy. So, ask yourself and your team these five questions before you settle on a strategy and go live.

1) Will the cost benefit hold in the long run? 

So, you’ve put together your ideal technology infrastructure. Right now, it looks economically advantageous, but how will it fare over the first year? How about over five or even ten years? Being able to sustain a cost-effective return on your technology investments is important, so take the time to evaluate the state of your infrastructure periodically.

2) Is your new infrastructure scalable? 

Can the infrastructure you’ve chosen sustain growth? It’s natural for enterprises to grow over time, which necessitates adding new users and endpoints. Being able to respond to these changes in your organization’s computing demands is part of being a successful IT administrator, so be sure to design your infrastructure with scalability in mind.

3) Have you considered how you’ll adapt to future innovations?

You could have the best, most versatile infrastructure out there at present, but if something innovative comes along that presents substantial gains, you will want to be able to integrate that solution. Technology is meant to enhance and augment your enterprise, so implementing an infrastructure that’s flexible can present you the ability to implement future technologies efficiently.

4) Are you prepared for unexpected events like a network outage or data breach?

When designing your computing infrastructure, you want it to be proactive, detecting and stopping threats before they begin. But even with the most robust defenses in place, your company is likely to see the occasional network outage and experience downtime. Make sure that you have systems in place to address what happens when things are offline for a period of time.

5) Did you consider probable regulatory requirements?

Chances are that your enterprise needs to adhere to standards set by regulatory compliance, like PCI, HIPAA, and more. Be sure that your enterprise takes this into consideration when designing, implementing, and improving your infrastructure.

Take Your Infrastructure Design Seriously

Designing your enterprise’s infrastructure can be seen as investing in the future success of your organization—it’s not something you want to do haphazardly. Oftentimes, it’s easier to outsource infrastructure design and deployment to a third party to ensure that your technology management resources aren’t overburdened.

If your organization is considering an infrastructure redesign, IronEdge can help. Our expert team is proficient in the design and implementation of on-site and cloud-based configurations. Tell us what your enterprise needs and we’ll help you build and refine your infrastructure.