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Fighting the Monster called Infrastructure Complexity

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PCQ Bureau
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It's big and scary and has its tentacles spread all over the place. There's

no escaping it because it's everywhere, including your scariest of dreams. It

scares away IT managers and gives CIOs sleepless nights. No we're not talking

about a monster from a horror film, but something that lurks around within your

own IT infrastructure. It's called the IT Infrastructure complexity monster, and

it grows bigger with every new IT project deployment you undertake.

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Indeed, while we're all busy implementing exciting new projects, the IT

infrastructure complexity monster is gradually becoming more powerful. Unless

it's controlled, it could actually reduce employee productivity and increase

your costs. It shouldn't happen that one day this monster becomes so big that

your IT infrastructure starts managing you instead of the other way round. It

may sound unbelievable, but it's true.

Take a simple example of email. It's a real productivity tool, but if your

employees forget all their other work and start checking their mails every five

minutes, start sending jokes and chain mails to friends and colleagues, it

becomes counter-productive. This can actually happen when they have unlimited

access to email. The same argument holds true for unlimited web browsing.

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Let's move to a more complex example. You give your employees an ERP solution

to book customer orders, a CRM solution to handle customer complaints, and an

SCM solution to track customer order shipments. They will be so busy shifting

between multiple applications and learning how to use them that they will

actually take longer to do their jobs (and by the way, they'll also be checking

their emails every five minutes and sending jokes and chain mails to friends and

colleagues!). They will also be busy with other applications you've provided

them, like the Intranet to file leave applications, the usual Office Suite to

work on spreadsheets and presentations, possibly an HR system to determine how

many leaves they have pending (and by the way, they will be checking their

email!!).

Your IT team will also be very busy handling employee complaints, running

between so many servers, storage, and networking equipment, monitoring

application performance, storage and CPU usage, handling interoperability issues

between different applications, and doing routine administrative tasks. So

everybody is indeed busy doing their work, but it's actually more about managing

complexity than anything else. This is obviously not what you really wanted. It

just gradually crept into your system. Now, unless it's controlled, it will chew

up your management costs and force productivity to take a nose dive.

So the million dollar question is, how do you combat this monster? What

should be your strategy? The answer of course is to try and extract as much as

possible out of your IT infrastructure. But that's easier said than done, and in

this story, we'll try to find some answers.

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The main culprits



The first step to reducing complexity is to understand the reasons behind

it, and there can be many, some of which could come as a surprise. While there

would be many that are unique to your organization, there are some that are

common to all. We'll look at the common ones.

Legacy systems



The older your organization, the more complex your IT infrastructure is

likely to be, because it would have a lot of legacy systems. There would be all

sorts of operating systems, all sorts of networking equipment, different service

providers, and applications all over the place. As soon as you bring in a new

application into the system, you're going to face integration challenges. You'll

have to redefine old processes according to your setup, and establish new ones.

Add to that the high rate of obsolescence in IT, and you have a lot of complex

legacy to manage.

Organizational growth



Yes, believe it or not, but organizational growth is definitely one of the

causes behind increased IT infrastructure complexity. While growth is good for

any organization, it poses a lot of challenges for the IT department. Growth can

be of two types-new acquisitions and expansion. Both have their own distinct set

of challenges. New acquisitions involve inducting a new company into your

system. It will have its own IT infrastructure, and a completely different set

of business apps and processes as compared to yours. It will have a different

work culture, people with different mindsets, and a completely different set of

processes. Bringing them into your system, getting people to adopt your policies

and practices, integrating their systems into yours can be extremely challenging

and time consuming.

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The other type of growth is expansion, wherein your organization enters new

markets, opens new branches, etc. This would require putting up IT

infrastructure in new branch offices, ensuring their connectivity to HO, finding

skilled manpower to manage the setups there, and ensuring that your data center

is capable of handling the additional load brought in by those branches. So

while setting up a new branch may not be too difficult per say, it increases

network complexity, making it ever more difficult to manage.

Growing mobile workforce



While a mobile workforce is a boon for every organization, it has become the

bane of most IT departments. This workforce comprises of both laptops and PDAs.

They're out in the field and require remote connectivity into your system. For

this, you need to ensure that you have a secure remote access system in place,

which is accessible from anywhere. The larger the mobile workforce, the bigger

the challenge. You also have to worry about the security of your own network

when these mobile users connect to it. They could be infected, and bring down

your entire network. What you need are solutions to secure them. A third

challenge is in ensuring the security of data on those devices. What if they get

stolen? How do you ensure that data in those devices doesn't fall in the wrong

hands?

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More applications



When you don't have good business applications and process automation, you

spend time and energy convincing the management about deploying them. But when

you do have them, they pose a different challenge altogether. How do you ensure

that they're integrated and work together seamlessly? For instance, you

implement ERP for automating your business processes, and a CRM to handle your

customers. Since customers are a part of your ERP system already, it would be

only natural for you to expect that the CRM application will jel with it

smoothly.

Unfortunately that doesn't always happen. The CRM application has its own

unique set of features, and might require information in a format that the ERP

system can't really provide. So you end up creating hooks between the two

applications.

Integration between multiple applications isn't the only problem. Having so

many applications is another problem in itself. When every employee has to

access multiple apps to do his or her work, it reduces productivity because a

lot of time is spent shuffling between them. The challenge then is to provide

all information on the same interface.

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More equipment in the data center



This is a no brainer. When you install new applications, you need the

requisite hardware for them-more servers, storage, power, and connectivity. As

you continue deploying newer applications, your data center becomes a veritable

mess of equipment from so many different vendors. The number of servers

increases, power consumption grows by leaps and bounds, application performance

deteriorates, storage capacity rises and data is kept all over the place in so

many different islands, and much more. So much so that managing data center

complexity is a topic in itself.

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.

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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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