Scale of corporate IT infrastructure has increased dramatically over the past decade and a half. At many companies, it has moved from basements with a few dozen servers to sophisticated data centers with thousands or tens of thousands of them.
Networked storage hardly existed in the early ’90s but today consumes tens of millions of dollars in large IT organizations. A data center is a facility that centralizes an organization’s IT operations and equipment, and where it stores, manages, and disseminates its data.
IT Infrastructure runs the applications that process transactions, handles the customer data that yield market insights, and supports the analytical tools that help executives and managers make and communicate the decisions shaping complex organizations. In fact, IT infrastructure has made possible much of the corporate growth and rising productivity of recent years.
An Effective IT Infrastructure
An effective IT infrastructure operation creates value by making sound choices about which technologies to use and how to integrate them. A technology product purchased from a vendor may be a commodity, but the ability to bring together hardware, software, and support to provide the right combination of cost, resiliency, and features for a new application isn’t.
When it comes to IT infrastructure requirements, data centers are a top priority. Data centers are now seen as a key business parameter, and not as an external facility for storage of information and business operation models. They have become critical for the very functioning of a big business enterprise. Any interruptions in your data center operations can virtually bring down the business to its knees if you don’t have an efficient backup strategy.
