Top 5 benefits of optimizing your IT infrastructure

Many managers fully realize the benefits of IT infrastructure only after its competent formation or reorganization. There are not always internal resources for this, so we recommend contacting the system integration company. This approach will save time and reduce personnel training costs.

IT cost optimization tools

Among the tools for optimizing IT costs, it is worth taking a closer look at the most relevant ones.

IT audit

IT audit is a comprehensive analysis and professional assessment of the entire IT infrastructure of a company and its individual parts. With the help of it, you can achieve the maximum return on funds invested in the implementation and maintenance of the information system. IT audit includes:

• Analysis of the current situation in the IT infrastructure;
• Collection of data on functioning hardware and software;
• Analysis of existing IT-processes, research of their efficiency and optimization possibilities;
• Evaluation of the effectiveness of the IT department and the level of personnel training;
• Assessing risks and determining methods to minimize them;
• General description of the existing information system of the company;
• Search and formation of ways to build an optimal IT infrastructure with a detailed and step-by-step plan for “implementation”;
• Development of a strategy for the further development of IT infrastructure;
• Generation of a report with recommendations for troubleshooting and upgrading.

The result of an IT audit will be analytical reports on the current state of the information system. The reports will allow you to get comprehensive answers to questions about what the current IT infrastructure is, to what extent it meets the needs of the company and how its strategic development should take place in order to meet business needs. To implement the recommended measures, you can contact the hired team for outsourcing custom development.

Virtualization

These days, you have to deal with the fact that organizations often make the wrong choice and increase the number of physical servers instead of rationally distributing functionality and implementing virtualization. As a result, they annually lose a rather large amount for IT-maintenance.

The use of virtualization technology can significantly reduce IT costs not only in large companies, but also in small organizations. By the way, representatives of small and medium-sized businesses are more mobile and are actively switching to the cloud model of software delivery.

Business benefits of implementing virtual infrastructure:

1. Optimization of business processes, which allows you to significantly save money;
2. Reducing the number of workstations (servers) through their consolidation. Today, business tasks do not require multiple machines, but you can run the required number of guest operating systems in a virtual environment on one server, which will significantly reduce the cost of hardware support;
3. Reducing the number of IT staff. It is much easier to maintain one or several servers than several dozen, which means that you can reduce the number of IT specialists. In addition, you can completely abandon the services of a full-time system administrator and switch to IT outsourcing, having decently saved on the wages fund. Outsourcing will provide an opportunity to both reduce costs and increase the efficiency of IT system management and the level of infrastructure scalability;
4. Savings on electricity bills;
5. Reduced infrastructure administration costs, since virtualization provides remote access to the management console;
6. Ease and simplicity of cloning virtual machines. It is especially useful when expanding your business and wanting to deploy a new infrastructure, which can be done without any problems, just by copying the images and configuring the software.

Consequently, the choice of a server in most small and medium-sized businesses is an unjustified decision, and they can easily solve all problems using virtual capacities, thereby saving a lot of money.

Cloud services

An innovative and effective way to optimize IT infrastructure is the use of cloud services. When you transfer a server to the cloud, there is no need to purchase, repair and maintain expensive equipment. In any case, it is more profitable to move to the cloud than to purchase a new server to replace the failed one.

One of the areas of SaaS cloud services is applications as a service. In this case, the company acquires access to ready-made applications, for example, Microsoft Office 365, and it does not need to install applications on its own servers.

Thus, using cloud solutions, you can significantly reduce operating costs for IT, reduce the cost of purchasing licenses and software updates. In this case, all that remains is to pay for the use of software and equipment as a service, by subscription.