Future proof your business IT infrastructure with four key components

Future-proofing your IT infrastructure means designing and implementing scalable and flexible building blocks that will accommodate new technology and applications as they are needed. This requires a flexible and responsive IT infrastructure that can scale resources up and down in line with requirements and bring new products and services to market in a timely fashion. However, many organizations find themselves facing the continual ebb and flow of aging infrastructure, which limits scalability and demands regular, significant infusions of capital. To overcome these challenges and set themselves up for success, businesses need to develop an IT infrastructure strategy that optimizes short-term costs and limits long-term commitments while delivering the ultimate end-user experience. 

Future-proofing your business means building a foundation that is future-ready and resilient, ensuring your organization is prepared for whatever the future holds. Infrastructure requires a forward-thinking approach, investment in modern technology, and alignment with your long-term business goals to support future business growth and adaptability.

Building a resilient IT infrastructure requires a forward-thinking approach and a clear understanding of your long-term business goals. A future-proofed, flexible IT infrastructure is also resilient and incorporates intelligent automation while remaining efficient and cost-effective.

In this blog post, we discuss how to utilize IT infrastructure to position your organization for current and future success. We outline four key components that should be part of your IT infrastructure strategy: responsive IT, security and reliability, visibility and control, and access to a variety of resources. Building a resilient and scalable IT infrastructure is crucial for supporting future business needs and adapting to changes.

Assessing current IT infrastructure

Before you can future-proof your business, you need a clear understanding of where your IT infrastructure stands today. A comprehensive assessment of your current IT environment is the first step toward building a resilient, adaptive IT infrastructure that can meet tomorrow’s demands. This process allows you to identify areas of strength, uncover security vulnerabilities, and pinpoint outdated systems that may be holding your business back.

Start by evaluating your network infrastructure for scalability, security, and performance. Look for bottlenecks that could impede business growth and consider how emerging technologies—like software-defined networking—can enhance operational efficiency and reduce security risk. Next, review your IT systems, including hardware, software, and cloud services. Identify legacy systems or inefficient platforms that may pose a threat to your business operations, and prioritize upgrades or replacements to support future growth.

Cyber threats are evolving at an unprecedented pace, making it essential to assess your current defenses. Examine your endpoint protection, multi-factor authentication, and disaster recovery plans to ensure you’re prepared for emerging threats and unexpected disruptions. Strengthening these areas will help reduce downtime and protect your critical data from data breaches and human error.

Cloud computing is another critical component to evaluate. Assess your use of cloud platforms and cloud services to determine if your current setup supports your business strategy and future growth. Leveraging cloud environments can improve scalability, cost effectiveness, and enable intelligent automation, positioning your business to embrace new technologies as they arise.

Finally, review your data encryption, backup, and disaster recovery procedures. Ensuring your data is secure, easily recoverable, and compliant with industry standards is vital for long-term success and business continuity.

By conducting a thorough assessment of your current IT infrastructure, you can identify areas for improvement and develop a proactive approach to proofing your IT infrastructure against future challenges. Regular audits, continuous monitoring, and a forward-thinking approach to strategic planning will help your IT team stay ahead of emerging threats and evolving business needs. In the next section, we’ll explore how to translate these insights into a future-proofing strategy that aligns with your business goals and positions your organization for long-term success.

Responsive IT

Automation and AI

In the current rapidly changing business landscape, delays in provisioning and deploying new resources can spell doom for an organization. Your IT infrastructure must be agile enough to deliver new capabilities and capacity quickly and without disruption. This means that your IT staff must be able to rapidly shift priorities to deliver new products and services without being overwhelmed by maintenance or operational issues. Cloud services, connectivity, platform modernization, automation, and the support of external technical specialists can help increase IT responsiveness without compromising quality or reliability.

Automation, powered by artificial intelligence, can streamline manual tasks that are often error-prone, reduce human error, and free up your IT team for more strategic initiatives. The benefits of automation include:

• Automated patching, backup scheduling, and access control to ensure critical updates and safeguards are always in place
• Enhanced testing processes and improved transparency in IT infrastructure management
• Proactive detection and resolution of issues through monitoring tools and real-time analytics
• Reduced mean time to repair (MTTR) by up to 36% with AI for IT operations (AIOps)
• Increased operational efficiency and situational awareness with advanced automation technologies, such as machine vision

Monitoring and analytics

By leveraging monitoring tools and real-time analytics, organizations gain full visibility into infrastructure performance. This enables:

• Proactive detection and resolution of issues
• Continuous data processing for early detection of problems
• Improved transparency and reporting for IT infrastructure management

Operational efficiency

Deploying automation and AI not only streamlines operations but also allows IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives, driving innovation and business growth.

Security, reliability, and protection against cyber threats

Disaster recovery

Customer expectations of the companies they do business with are higher than ever. Weak security and unreliable services are the enemies of customer satisfaction—your data, applications, and IT infrastructure must be secure and reliable for your brand to succeed. Reliable connectivity with failover systems in place, combined with redundant security measures, can help you avoid disaster. It is essential to have a comprehensive disaster recovery plan to minimize downtime and data loss in the event of disruptions such as cyberattacks, natural disasters, or technical failures.

Redundancy

Hardware failures pose a significant risk to business continuity, so a redundant design ensures that if one component fails, another immediately takes over. Key redundancy and backup strategies include:

• Automated, off-site, and immutable backups for operational resilience against ransomware
• Robust data management strategy with regular backups to prevent loss from cyber threats
• Redundant network and hardware components to ensure continuous uptime

Continuous security measures

Implementing multi-layered security solutions is essential for network infrastructure protection. Security should be treated as a continuous, proactive process, utilizing:

• Next-gen firewalls
• Advanced threat protection
• Regular penetration testing
• Multi-factor authentication
• Endpoint protection

Look for a Hosted Private Cloud provider that offers uptime guarantees and tools like Backup-as-a-Service and Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service to help minimize disruptions.

Visibility and control

Self-service and oversight

All the resources and redundancies in the world won’t help you deliver the experience users expect if you don’t have the visibility and power to deploy them when required. Lengthy delays can occur when you are dependent on providers to scale resources up and down, resulting in a poor customer experience. Look for a service provider that offers aspects of self-service control over data center and cloud resources so you can monitor consumption and scale capacity up or down appropriately. Hosted Private Cloud allows you to consolidate all business-critical workloads in a single space, improving visibility and oversight.

Situational awareness

Situational awareness is essential for future-proofing your business IT infrastructure. Integrating monitoring tools provides full visibility into infrastructure performance, enabling proactive detection and resolution of issues.

Modular architectures and process mapping

Adopting modular, service-oriented architectures like microservices allows for independent updates and scaling of applications, increasing agility. Mapping business processes to IT systems helps anticipate how future changes will impact workflows. Regular assessments of IT infrastructure can identify underutilized resources and areas for improvement. Taking a phased approach to implementing changes allows for testing and optimization, reducing the risk of disruption.

Access to a variety of resources

Embracing cloud and modernization

The past few years have taught us the importance of having the ability to respond to rapidly changing demand forecasts. Relying on a single IT environment or network means you have nowhere to go when the unexpected happens. To address this, businesses should embrace cloud computing for scalability, flexibility, and cost efficiency. Embrace modernization and leverage automation to simplify and streamline scaling.

Building a scalable IT environment

A scalable IT infrastructure can adapt to business growth without requiring a complete overhaul, saving time and resources. Build an IT environment composed of an infrastructure mix that includes:

• Private cloud
• Colocation
• Public cloud
• On-premises deployments with seamless connectivity

Integration and hybrid IT

Integrating new technologies with existing systems is crucial to ensure compatibility and resilience as your business evolves. Hosted Private Cloud may not be a one-size-fits-all environment for data, applications, or workloads. Still, its scalability, reliability, and security make it a vital component of your hybrid IT architecture.

By 2027, 90% of organizations are expected to adopt hybrid cloud solutions, highlighting the growing importance of hybrid IT. Regular audits can help mature organizations save up to 40% on cloud costs through automated rightsizing. A managed services provider can offer expert guidance to help businesses, especially small businesses, build a future-ready and resilient IT infrastructure. Scalability lowers costs and improves efficiency by preventing wasted resources as business needs change. Adopting adaptive and scalable IT infrastructure strategies is essential to meet tomorrow's demands and stay competitive. A Hosted Private Cloud provider with standardized connections to other platforms can ensure you always have access to the resources you need when you need them.

Leveraging IT infrastructure for a better customer experience requires a flexible and responsive approach that prioritizes short-term costs while delivering long-term benefits. By incorporating these four key components—responsive IT, security and reliability, visibility and control, and access to a variety of resources—into your IT infrastructure strategy, you can set your business up for success and deliver superior customer experiences.

Solve your complex IT challenges with Flexential

The FlexAnywhere® Platform is an integrated set of capabilities, including colocation, cloud, connectivity, data protection, and professional services, which support our customers' hybrid IT journey. Spanning a national footprint of 40+ data centers, including cloud data centers, disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) data centers, and over interconnected access to cloud provider on-ramps, the highly connected FlexAnywhere platform provides the required flexibility to empower our customers' evolving infrastructure requirements.

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