Infrastructure Strategy and the Roadmap

In my last blog I examined the outlines of an infrastructure roadmap. In this blog I look at strategy.

Infrastructure has a key role to play in the enterprise. It needs to support business agility and change in a way that provides value and is seen as supporting as well as providing stability for the Applications and systems that rely on it to deliver. This delicate balancing act should support services and solutions that increasingly need to be more secure and are easier for people to use than ever before.

For most organisations there are two main decisions to make on Infrastructure:

1. In-house or outsource: there are a large number of options for outsourcing that can be cost effective or efficient. Most organisations have a mixture of contracts they use. These can range from simple 3rd party maintenance on PC’s Servers and Phone systems to fully outsourced service providers providing turn-key solutions for whole units or functions such as service desks, Network Services, 
2. On Premise or Cloud: if your outsourced partners are already cloud providers or considering using cloud. Today’s cloud services provide scalability and flexibility as well as potentially taking some of the backend engineering and operations away for a monthly fee. On Premises equipment tends to be owned and requires operations, backups, Disaster Recovery, Upgrading, servicing and more direct support. 

Roadmap Components

Depending on the size and scale of the enterprise, each component may need to have its own roadmap. Even if an area isn’t forecast to have any changes over the lifetime of the roadmap it may be worth including a review in future years to ensure it isn’t forgotten during annual planning

Whilst we can consider these areas separately they typically overlap into multiple paths and it’s in this space that the roadmap can start to support your organisation. If you have separate teams then the roadmap can become the glue that joins teams together into a more cohesive whole and helps to foster the communication and interdependencies between teams.

Some typical examples, include

•      Data Centre service Migration from in house, on Premises to a cloud based provider such as Amazon or Microsoft. Depending on the workloads being moved and the reasons for the move, multiple teams , departments and user communities can be impacted.

•    365 – If this is deploying Skype for Business then it will impact the Mobile devices, Telephony, Network and Storage teams directly

•      Security - Implementing encryption for data will impact storage, core systems, and operations

Infrastructure Capabilities

So what falls under the remit of your IT Infrastructure capabilities? These include :-

•      Data Centres- Location, capacity, performance

•      Compute - Servers and processing to run the Infrastructure and applications used by the business

•      Storage- Physical location of the data used and retained by the business

•      Core Systems – Typically email and office applications are considered part of Infrastructure. Areas like Microsoft O365, Google office,

•      Network – Physical and logical connections between offices, service providers and the internet

•      Telephony – Fixed Telephone, call centres, Call Recording

•      Mobile devices used by staff at work and as part of a Bring your own strategy (BYOD)

•      Security – Access, Authorisation and Authentication to the network, applications and services

•      Operations- team that manage the day to day running and changes to Infrastructure

Summary of Roadmap Benefits

As part of two blogs I have penned on the subject of the infrastructure roadmap I have examined the outline of a road map, the strategy, the typical components, and the benefits. To summarise, the benefits are as follows:

1.    Helps to manage the Investment and operating lifecycle of equipment and contracts

2.    Shows a program of projects linked to business objectives

3.    Provides a framework for easier communications

4.    Supports realignment when change happens

Roadmaps should be updated annually and drawn up in a way that is relatively easy to read and understand.

How can Fifth Step Help?

Fifth Step can analyse and document the current Infrastructure in place. We identify issues and gaps and structure the data into a useable format. From the assessment we can identify and prioritise needs and objectives. We then develop and produce the roadmap with clients, delivering and supporting their internal communication process and linkage with other areas in IT and the business.

So, to summarise:

1. Analyse and document your current Infrastructure
2. Identify and prioritise needs and objectives
3. Develop and produce a roadmap
4. Deliver or support the communication process
5. Support the delivery of work and projects arising.

I hope you have found my two blogs on infrastructure road maps useful and enlightening. These are the first in a series of blogs I will be writing from now on that embrace IT Leadership themes, the challenges and the opportunities for CIOs and their teams. Thanks for reading.

If you want more then you can listen to the podcast, view the Infographic or look at other areas Fifth Step can help at FifthStep.com