INFRASTRUCTURE
ASSESSMENT
For many customers aligning their existing infrastructure with business goals, and balancing costs, resourcing and timeframes, can impede their business development journey. A VIGILANT.IT Infrastructure Assessment analyses whether you’re getting value and productivity from your existing technology ecosystem. Key to a successful overhaul of your legacy environment is maximising performance while controlling costs.
That’s where VIGILANT.IT can help. As your partner in all things ‘Infrastructure’, we can create a roadmap which captures where you are today, where you need to go, and how you’re going to get there. We do this by undertaking a technical and business discovery of your legacy IT; developing a transition strategy aligned to your business goals; and mapping a realistic implementation strategy tailored to your unique circumstances.
YOUR JOURNEY
Overhauling infrastructure can be a complex and potentially overwhelming task for an IT team that also has to ‘keep the lights on’ with a limited number of staff. Considerations such as identifying the weak points of your current setup, what to change first, impact on existing processes, and compliance and data security issues, are just some of the issues to be considered. By leveraging over a decade of infrastructure-building experience, our team will work hand-in-hand with your internal team to provide a Implementation Plan specific to your organisation. We’ll discuss which applications to move and when, the impact on existing users and business processes, and how to extend IT governance and systems management to encompass your new environment.
HIGH-LEVEL DESIGN
Any design must be capable of execution with the least disruption, so the first priority is to establish a joint team, consisting of your IT people and VIGILANT.IT engineers. It is important that your organisation’s business units such as Finance, HR and Sales & Marketing, also have input into the journey.
VIGILANT.IT works closely with the in-house team to conduct a top-down assessment, and the results can be used to map out a list of which changes have the highest potential value and are better suited for transition. This will establish a start point for any organisation, and usually outlines some quick wins and irons out some tough questions.
Our assessment will show how each application or workload is architected in the recommended infrastructure environment and will also show how solutions are configured and integrated into yourexisting set-up.
IMPLEMENTATION PLAN
We collaborate with you to establish a practice for evaluating and experimenting to help determine
what targeted applications and workloads are migrated to the most appropriate infrastructure
deployment model, such as:
- Infrastructure as Service (IaaS)
- Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- Private and or hyperscale Public Cloud
Each application needs to be analysed to determine the best fit for its hosting environment. If the workload is to be retired or no longer receive further investment, the decision whether to host the application workload on a Public Cloud (such as Azure) and if not, will it stay on-premises, or in a private cloud. If the workload can be placed on an IaaS cloud environment, would it be a candidate for transition to obtain benefits of cost reduction? A similar approach is taken to analyse for SaaS and PaaS.
BALANCING THE BUDGET
It will be important to work with your finance department to agreed scenarios for the implementation, including aggressive, moderate, and slow transition plans. An aggressive plan might involve moving 50 percent of your workloads to the new platform in the first phase, whereas a moderate plan might be 30 percent, and a slower plan might be 10 percent. Aggressive plans will potentially save you more money, but this must be weighed against any risk and higher transition costs.
We’ll end up with an Implementation Plan that documents the objectives of your transition to the target architecture; applications and workloads to achieve optimal results; proposed timeframes and benchmarks; and expected results and benefits. Whichever infrastructure model is best for you, the Implementation plan will consider the impact over time to your organisation.
A VIGILANT.IT Implementation Plan addresses how each of your organisation’s operational stakeholders will be impacted:
- Enterprise architecture
- Information security and risk management
- Data classification
- IT risk management
- Operations
- Human resources and the evolution of roles
- Applications teams
- Business units
- Finance
TRANSITION – THE MOVE BEGINS
After the team has prioritised the transition schedule, company management will clearly understand what applications are being moved, when and how. The transition will encompass a well attributed catalogue of applications managed by your IT. Next the relative importance of each attribute (say, business criticality or level of system integration) can be weighted, and the prioritised list can be built.
Throughout the process the team at VIGILANT.IT will work with you to create a realistic blueprint which should not be seen as an end point, but as a beginning for your organisation’s digital transformation journey.
WHY VIGILANT.IT
Over a decade of infrastructure design and build experience.
Multiple Microsoft Gold competencies and product testing experience with Microsoft.
Qualified Azure Architects and Microsoft MVPs (Most Valued Professionals). Discover more
Call now on 1300 148 588 or book a call to discuss integrating Infrastructure Assessment with your other services, or setting it up as a standalone service.