Tech Pro Space LLC
Tech Pro Space LLC

Building and Maintaining IT Infrastructure

04/27/2022 11:46 AM By Vicente Agama

Building and Maintaining IT Infrastructure

Scalability

Scalability is important for any business regardless of size. It ensures your infrastructure can keep pace with your growth

Many invest in hardware and software that can only handle the demand during a normal day. They leave no room for seasonal spikes or sudden surges in popularity.

Having a scalable system means making sure you have ample storage space and sufficient processing power to handle peaks in user activity and data usage.

It also means having an infrastructure that doesn’t slow down as it accommodates more users. The last thing you want is for all those new customers to feel like they’re waiting forever when they try to access or use one of your products.

Without scalability built into your IT infrastructure. You could end up losing customers if large numbers are unable to access your products or services.

High availability

A high availability architecture is designed to maximize business continuity by making applications and data available in the event of a failure.

To ensure you have the redundancy you need for your business, consider having redundant components. Redundant components like extra hard drives, network equipment, network interfaces, servers or computers on hand ready to go.

Planning for disaster recovery needs to start with a conversation with the business about expectations for maintaining availability and how much downtime can be tolerated.

A key question should be how much more expensive will it be to implement high availability technologies compared with other options, so you can better determine if it’s worth the investment.

Mission critical systems often require 100 percent uptime, even brief outages can have a significant impact. Tweaking performance for these systems is an ongoing task that requires monitoring and fine-tuning often in response to changing business needs or spikes in demand.

IT infrastructure should always be available for use as much as possible.

Continuity of service and disaster recovery

Before a failure happens. You can take steps to minimize the impact.

The first step is to create and maintain backups of your data. This way your important data can be restored.

You should store your backups in a separate location.

You should test your backup system regularly to ensure it works correctly, and that staff knows how to use it.

If something does go wrong. You will want to try and limit downtime as much as possible.

You need to pre-plan for potential disasters or failures in case of a disaster.

Have up-to-date lists of suppliers and providers that will be able to provide support if needed (for example: Managed Services Provider).

These steps will help keep you ready if disaster strikes. Your systems are valuable tools that are used on a daily basis, so taking these precautions makes good business sense!

Security

Set up full disk encryption on your computer if you have sensitive information stored on the local disk.

Antivirus software. Not all are created equally. There are some that can be managed. They monitor odd behaviors on the system and will put a stop to most threats they encounter.

Backups: Regularly backing up your system allows you to restore data if it becomes corrupted, ensuring continued business productivity and security. Backups require some sort of oversight by IT personnel. Otherwise they might get neglected.

User permissions. You only need to give a user enough permissions to do their job and not make changes to systems. Even administrators should only have the necessary permissions to make the necessary changes.

Monitoring: You should implement monitoring for your servers, computers and network. You need to know what is going on in your network.

Regulatory compliance and governance

As businesses become increasingly digital. The need to remain compliant with industry regulations is greater than ever.

Your organization may be required to comply with multiple regulations, depending on your industry and location.

Failure to properly manage information can result in serious fines or legal action against your organization.

Because regulatory compliance is so important (and often difficult), many businesses are turning to IT services providers for help meeting their goals. A managed IT services provider delivers many advantages related to maintaining compliance in a variety of industries.

Support and maintenance

The ongoing support of the IT infrastructure is the work that never ends. This includes managing and maintaining the IT infrastructure, performing software upgrades and implementing new projects and features.

It is important to have best practices in place to ensure you’re not trying to figure this out as you go along. If you don’t do it right. You will be fighting fires constantly. Which can be very stressful.

You run the risk of burning out you or your team by overloading them with too many issues to resolve and no spare time for proactive planning or innovation.

Outsourcing is one option for building and maintaining your IT infrastructure.

If you have found yourself here. It is likely that you are interested in outsourcing your IT infrastructure.

Should you outsource?

Outsourcing infrastructure management can be a more cost-efficient option than managing an internal team. It can also help free up your own IT staff to focus on other projects that help grow your business.

You might find outsourcing is the best solution when it comes to staying compliant with industry regulations or accessing the latest and best technology.

Your IT infrastructure is a full-time job. It takes time, money and training to stay on top of industry trends.

Vicente Agama