Fighting the Monster called Infrastructure Complexity

Continued from page: 1

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Fighting the complexity monster
The million dollar question now is how do you reduce IT infrastructure complexity? Obviously, there's no magic wand that you can swing and get the answer. You need to treat it just like any other IT project. It should have an objective followed by a set of tasks to achieve it. This may sound very difficult, but if it's broken up into smaller pieces, it becomes more manageable. The objective for instance, could be as simple as reducing down your IT budgets by a certain percentage. Or it could be to save the organization a certain amount through better usage of existing IT resources. The rest of the things will automatically fall in place.

Fighting complexity has to be a continuous process, otherwise you'll never be able to achieve your objective. Let's now look at some of the ways to combat complexity.

Standardize
One of the biggest nightmares in any IT infrastructure is to have a heterogeneous environment with different systems, applications, and platforms. This requires multiple management systems, which in turn requires manpower with different skill sets. For instance, even a simple thing like the desktop PC can become a nightmare to manage if there are multiple hardware configurations and Operating Systems. So the thing to do is to standardize whatever you can-Operating Systems, email systems, hardware, vendor selection process, procurement process, etc.

Standardization will actually improve the robustness of your IT infrastructure, and there are enough management standards out there to follow, such as ITIL, COBIT, etc. Many vendors have also defined their own IT infrastructure optimization frameworks and best practices, which you could use for reference. If for instance, your IT infrastructure is primarily Windows based, then you could follow Microsoft's Infrastructure Optimization Model (IOI).

Virtualize
This one doesn't need an introduction, because everybody is talking about it. Even leading research firms like Gartner suggest that virtualization will have a tremendous impact on how IT is managed and deployed. Server virtualization is already a hot favorite amongst most organizations, and is being used to reduce the number of servers in the data center. There are other forms of virtualization available as well, which promise to simplify the IT infrastructure considerably. These include virtualization of desktops, storage, applications, and networking. That pretty much covers everything in the IT infrastructure. Many companies have deployed virtualization. This time for instance, we received two projects from Infosys and ICICI Bank on server virtualization. These have considerably reduced the total number of hardware servers in their data centers, and even promise to reduce complexity and power consumption, improve manageability and server usage.

Consolidate
Virtualization isn't the only way of doing consolidation, which is why we've kept this point separately. You could for instance, remove all the different islands of storage in your data center, and put then on a single large storage box. Or you could remove multiple rack servers and replace them with blades. You could go for a UTM device instead of multiple individual security devices. You could even go for a single network that carries all your voice, video, as well as data traffic. All this would obviously lead to lesser equipment in the data center, which in turn would improve manageability.

Centralize
Instead of having hundreds of servers, storage, etc all over the place, it's best to centralize them today. If your organization has branch offices all over the country, then centralization makes a lot of sense. This is simply because finding and deploying skilled manpower in all the branches is a major challenge. Many organizations today are therefore moving all their applications and servers into a single, central data center. This improves manageability considerably.

Keep it simple
The best way to fight complexity is to of course keep the vision as simple as possible. Keep a simple vision for everyone, so that they can easily follow it. If the vision itself is complex, then everything else is likely to be.

Drive commoditization
You don't have to use bleeding edge technology all the time. It costs more, both in terms of cost of acquisition as well as maintenance. Things get commoditized in the IT world very fast, so learn to take advantage of that. At the same time, remember that IT equipment becomes obsolete very quickly well, so don't purchase equipment that's reaching the end of its lifecycle. You'll end up spending more on its maintenance and administration!

Recycle equipment
Don't throw away equipment until its completely useless. You'll always find an application for it. That's because what's low-end for one user could be high-end for another. At the same time, if you must replace equipment, then donate your old equipment while they're still in working condition to the needy outside the organization, such as a school. It will improve your organization's CSR image.

Enhance current infrastructure with minimum investment

Better integration
Tighter coupling between various applications is the need of the hour, otherwise your employees will continue to toil with shifting between multiple application interfaces. As most of the applications today have a web based front-end, one should take advantage of that and try to consolidate their views on a single web page.

Use managed services
Finding skilled manpower to manage various aspects of your IT infrastructure is a key challenge, according to various surveys we've done in the past. As your organization grows, it would require different experts for managing the storage, security, servers, connectivity, etc. One of the solutions to the problem is to go the managed services way. Outsource one or more of these tasks to an external agency, who then take care of bringing the right manpower in to do the job. Managed services can include outsourcing specific parts of your IT infrastructure management to total outsourcing, wherein the complex IT infrastructure, right from the equipment to its management is outsourced. Nothing really belongs to the organization. They just worry about their business.

Lastly, please keep in mind that fighting complexity is not a free activity, i.e. there will be investments involved. Just as you invest in a business application so that your organization can earn more, you also need to invest in reducing complexity to save cost. The rest will automatically follow.

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