Building an Infrastructure with Growth in Mind (
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Whether your company is a marketing firm with 100 employees or a 700-employee manufacturer, your goals undoubtedly call for growth. And today, more than ever, that means a flexible, scalable, cost-effective infrastructure that can grow as your company grows.Creating that type of infrastructure can be more difficult than it seems, especially for companies that have already invested significant money and time in building an existing architecture they are rapidly outgrowing. Not only is the idea of upgrading a technology infrastructure daunting, but it’s expensive and time-consuming, leaving you less time to run your business.
So what are your options? One very valid option is moving as much as possible to a virtualized environment, using VMware for server and data center consolidation. Doing so helps provision resources as needed. Storage consolidation, via data deduplication technologies, also is a smart move.
“I talk to very few companies [in the midmarket] that aren’t either using or considering it as a way to get a handle on their growth,” said Andrew Reichman, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. “It has the potential to add flexibility, scalability and manageability while increasing utilization.”
The downside is that if smaller companies are using VMware for the first time, they probably need to build a more robust storage infrastructure. To get the benefits of VMware, you need to migrate to a SAN and that adds a lot of complexity and some up-front cost. What’s more, efficiently provisioning servers, dynamically balancing workloads and consolidating physical servers to virtual machines is time- and labor-intensive.
More and more, companies looking to upgrade their infrastructure—especially if they don’t have an enterprise-class data center of their own—are turning to the hosted model, which offers peace of mind, scalability, flexibility and, more importantly, lets companies devote their energy to growing the business, not running IT.
“It’s a good time for companies to take a hard look at that decision,” Reichman said. “They have to ask themselves if they are in the business of running IT or in the business of running their business."
It’s an option more and more midsized companies are taking. According to a 2007 study by BizTechReports.Com, small and midsized businesses using hosted IT services are getting strong business benefits and generally are more satisfied than those with technology in-house. What’s more, the study found more than 85 percent of companies that outsourced said their IT organizations play an important role in that in general, companies that outsource experience fewer security incidents and technical failures and are better able to mitigate or avoid downtime.
And over time, employees are going to come to expect it.
“Generation Y grew up with Facebook and Google, and they expect corporate applications to have those kinds of service levels and responsiveness,” said Rachel Chalmers, a research director at The 451 Group.
