What is IT infrastructure management?

Introduction

IT infrastructure management encompasses the administration and optimization of hardware, software, and networks to ensure reliable, efficient, and secure digital systems that support business operations and growth. To remain competitive, organizations must adapt their IT systems to support evolving customer requirements, innovative technologies, and industry expectations. This guide is intended for IT managers, business leaders, and decision-makers seeking to understand the essentials of IT infrastructure management and its impact on business success. Understanding IT infrastructure management is crucial for these audiences because it directly influences business continuity, operational efficiency, and the ability to respond to changing market demands.

Without appropriate infrastructure management processes, the reliability of the IT environment and the business’s ability to serve its customers can falter. Key infrastructure components—such as servers, storage, networks, and applications—must be managed to maintain system performance, security, and operational stability. Managing these IT infrastructure components with the right tools and processes is essential for tracking, maintaining, and securing all elements of an organization's IT environment.

Effective infrastructure management is important because it prevents system failures, maintains performance, and enables smooth daily operations, making it critical for business continuity and operational efficiency.

Summary: What is IT infrastructure management?

IT infrastructure management encompasses hardware, software, networks, and data centers that support business operations. It oversees, maintains, and optimizes a company's entire IT ecosystem to ensure systems are reliable, secure, and efficient. Key components of IT infrastructure management include proactive monitoring, automated patching, robust security protocols, and disaster recovery planning. Together, these practices help organizations minimize downtime, protect sensitive data, and support business growth.

Definition of IT infrastructure management

IT infrastructure management encompasses hardware, software, networks, and data centers that support business operations. It involves the oversight of both physical components—such as servers, storage devices, and networking equipment—and virtualized resources, as well as the policies and procedures that ensure IT systems, the network, and data storage operate properly.

These management functions include the design, implementation, ongoing management, and decommissioning of all assets and practices. This covers system maintenance, employee and vendor training, physical and logical security, data storage technologies, operating systems, and everything in between.

Ongoing management also includes monitoring and optimizing infrastructure performance to improve system reliability, incident resolution, and operational efficiency. By breaking up these responsibilities, organizations can properly maintain each aspect of their IT environment and align with business goals.

IT infrastructure management components

Given the broad scope of IT infrastructure systems management, it can be helpful to break down responsibilities into key IT infrastructure components or infrastructure components, such as hardware, software, networks, storage, and security.

Hardware management

The hardware component includes essential physical components of IT infrastructure, such as servers, generators, CRAHs, UPSs, and personal computers. IT teams must perform regular maintenance and updates on this equipment, monitor hardware performance, troubleshoot issues, configure systems, and manage refresh cycles to optimize performance and availability. Regular maintenance and updates help optimize resource utilization and extend the lifespan of hardware. Organizations may also need to manage the integration of legacy systems into new deployments to avoid silos.

Systems management

Organizations also need to ensure software applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) programs, content management solutions, business intelligence suites, and productivity applications remain online and perform appropriately so internal and external customers can access the necessary resources. The software component also includes operating systems as a foundational element that integrates and supports physical system components and the organization’s business applications. Regular updates and maintenance are essential, and it is important to patch and update both software and operating systems to address security vulnerabilities and maintain system security.

Network management

Network management involves overseeing the network infrastructure that enables communication and data transfer between employees, customers, and partners, allowing them to access data and applications and communicate with the organization. Network management elements include routers, switches, firewalls, virtual network servers and software, and telephony equipment. IT personnel are responsible for configuring network devices, installing firewalls, performing regular maintenance, and consistently monitoring the network to identify and troubleshoot connectivity issues. Performance monitoring is also essential to ensure reliable connectivity and optimal network performance, allowing proactive detection and resolution of potential problems.

Data storage management

To get employees access to the data they need when they need it, organizations must provision the necessary storage space and manage data storage technology, the underlying software, and backup and recovery policies. In addition, it is crucial to have strategies in place for restoring critical systems in the event of data loss or disruption to maintain business continuity. These practices ensure that users can retrieve data quickly and securely. Organizations must also determine whether to store data onsite, with a third-party provider, or in the cloud.

Security

The security component encompasses everything needed to protect the hardware, software, network, and storage infrastructures. Defending against cyber threats that can compromise data and system integrity is a critical aspect of IT infrastructure management. This involves implementing and managing building access, login processes, configuration management, anti-virus software, firewalls, file encryption, managed detection and response (MDR) solutions, and data replication to improve an organization’s security posture. Identifying and mitigating security risks is essential to prevent breaches and disruptions, while regularly addressing security vulnerabilities through updates and configuration management helps maintain system security and stability.

Service management in IT infrastructure

Service management in IT infrastructure encompasses the structured processes and activities that ensure IT services are designed, delivered, and managed to support business objectives. Effective service management is essential for aligning IT services with organizational goals, ensuring that technology investments deliver maximum value.

Infrastructure management plays a foundational role in this process by supporting the availability, reliability, and security of IT services. Key infrastructure management processes include:

• Incident management
• Problem management
• Change management

These processes are vital for maintaining service continuity and minimizing disruptions. By proactively addressing incidents and implementing changes in a controlled manner, IT teams can reduce downtime and enhance the user experience.

Configuring network devices correctly and implementing robust security measures are also critical steps in preventing data breaches and safeguarding sensitive information. Through diligent service management, organizations can ensure that their IT infrastructure consistently supports business operations and adapts to evolving needs.

Cloud infrastructure management

Cloud infrastructure management focuses on overseeing cloud-based IT resources, including virtual machines, storage solutions, and networking equipment. As organizations increasingly rely on cloud services, effective management of these resources becomes crucial for maintaining system performance, ensuring data security, and supporting scalability.

A comprehensive approach to cloud infrastructure management involves continuous monitoring of system performance, managing software components, and enforcing security protocols to protect sensitive data. IT teams must also oversee data storage technologies and data centers to guarantee that information is stored securely and efficiently. Automated patch management and configuration management are essential practices for keeping cloud infrastructure up-to-date and resilient against emerging threats. By leveraging these strategies, organizations can optimize their cloud environments, maintain compliance, and ensure that their IT infrastructure remains robust and responsive to business demands.

Why IT infrastructure management is important for business

Businesses have too much on the line for their IT environments to falter. Proactive IT infrastructure management practices strengthen the uptime, performance, and security of business systems and data by identifying vulnerabilities and heading off issues before they can impact operations and the customer experience. Effective infrastructure management supports business continuity and operational efficiency, helping organizations maintain stability and adapt to changing demands. The oversight and visibility offered by consistently delivered management practices also help organizations align their IT strategies with business priorities to drive competitive edges. It can also help streamline procedures to improve agility and efficiency, avoid duplicated efforts, uphold IT compliance, control IT expenses, and enhance productivity. This is particularly relevant for organizations facing new corporate objectives, digital IT transformations, mergers or acquisitions, and other changes.

Infrastructure management is important for ensuring high-quality service delivery to both customers and internal users, minimizing downtime, and supporting smooth daily operations.

Benefits of IT infrastructure management

When properly managed, IT infrastructure can deliver multiple benefits to organizations. Effective IT infrastructure management leads to a robust IT infrastructure, supporting business growth and resilience. Effective IT infrastructure also plays a key role in achieving operational efficiency and minimizing disruptions.

Strengthen availability and performance

While outages and service disruptions are inherent in digital operations, active monitoring, regular maintenance, and other management tasks can help limit interruptions and speed reaction time to promote business continuity. These practices are essential for maintaining system health and optimizing infrastructure performance, ensuring that IT environments remain stable, secure, and efficient.

Drive cost savings and profitability

Businesses are consistently looking for opportunities to save money. By proactively managing the components of IT infrastructure, organizations can minimize costly downtime. The visibility offered by effective management enables critical insight into organizations’ assets, practices, and protocols to improve capacity planning, so that organizations don't overspend on unnecessary resources or trigger downtime or performance issues with insufficient resources. Infrastructure management solutions and IT infrastructure management solutions can further automate and streamline these processes, helping organizations reduce costs and improve operational efficiency. Additionally, a reliable online presence makes it so that customers can purchase products to generate revenue.

Improve agility

Aligning the IT environment with the business strategy and objectives and integrating automation helps organizations improve agility. Automation can tackle routine tasks and ease capacity planning, allowing IT teams to dedicate more time to other business-driven initiatives. The improved understanding of the environment also enables more rapid responses to issues and new demands. Integrating cloud-based deployments and management tools can also strengthen agility and improve efficiency. Emerging trends in IT infrastructure management, such as edge computing, AI and machine learning automation, IoT growth, and the shift towards hybrid and multi-cloud environments, are shaping future strategies, infrastructure design, and operational practices. There is more to cloud IT infrastructure than you would think.

Enable greater productivity

Interruptions and underperforming applications can diminish productivity. An infrastructure management team promotes more reliable, high-performing systems so employees remain online and working efficiently.

Enhance the customer experience

Delivering an unmatched customer experience is a critical differentiator for every business. Organizations with effective IT systems ensure customers can access their websites, interact with their teams, and procure merchandise easily. Delays in attaining required services can downgrade the customer experience, damaging the organization's reputation and potentially resulting in customer churn.

Why IT infrastructures need to be managed

IT infrastructure management is complex, with many individual yet interconnected pieces that must work together seamlessly to promote a secure, reliable, high-performing environment. Without the necessary commitment, organizations can expose themselves to a myriad of business-impacting issues that can threaten their operations, security, and bottom line. IT infrastructure management helps enable the IT environment to continue to drive business value.

An infrastructure manager, or IT infrastructure manager, plays a critical role in overseeing, maintaining, and securing the IT environment to strengthen its reliability and efficiency.

Support a rapidly changing environment

Business needs can change quickly, and the IT environment must be able to flex and scale to address these evolving requirements. IT infrastructure management provides an awareness that allows organizations to scale IT resources, including servers, power, bandwidth, and storage, to support future growth without overspending. For organizations that are managing multiple independent IT environments because of a merger or acquisition, this insight can help consolidate the infrastructures and eliminate redundant efforts and costs.

Address outdated systems

Technology evolves quickly, and keeping up to date can be challenging. Dedicated efforts to manage the infrastructure can help organizations track and monitor IT assets so they can replace aging or underperforming technology to boost operations. Timely hardware and software upgrades can also foster efficiency and drive business capabilities.

Recognize network and connectivity issues

In a digital business landscape, connectivity is king. Without a skilled eye consistently monitoring network performance and managing network devices, interconnections can fail. IT infrastructure management ensures network devices operate as needed and that sufficient bandwidth is available to support data delivery.

Keep pace with mounting data

Managing the rapid surge of data is an ongoing challenge for organizations. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global data center market is projected to reach $358.18 billion by 2034. Through IT management practices, organizations can be prepared with sufficient data storage space and effective data management practices to support this growth and minimize the risk of data loss.

Support security

Robust security is a must for every element of every IT environment. Proper management can strengthen the security strategy to protect systems, data, and networks. This is especially crucial for organizations with sensitive data and more stringent compliance obligations. Organizations can incur unnecessary fines, lose data, and risk customer trust without the appropriate protections.

IT infrastructure management best practices

To ensure a high-performing IT infrastructure, organizations should employ IT infrastructure management best practices. Managing infrastructure effectively involves using proven strategies and tools, such as proactive monitoring, automation, and disaster recovery planning, to optimize performance, security, and scalability.

One key best practice is the use of automated monitoring tools for continuous system performance tracking and proactive issue detection, which helps maintain IT infrastructure health.

Key best practices include:

• Collecting information:
  Effective management begins with a discovery process in which organizations gather information on their IT systems, applications, and the processes and practices in place to maintain, service, and secure these resources. This data helps organizations build a comprehensive IT management strategy and ensure that no resources or processes are overlooked.
• Establish and implement management standards:
  Using the knowledge gained in the discovery process, organizations should devise IT administration standards that meet their unique needs to ensure the appropriate deployment and use of IT infrastructure. This can include setting security protocols, configuring systems, designing training, determining maintenance processes and schedules for operating system platforms, and developing data management practices. After establishing these standards, organizations must ensure they are effectively and consistently implemented and enforced.
• Monitor the environment and adapt the strategy:
  Ongoing monitoring of the environment and critical practices, using security and operations analysts as well as key metrics—such as downtime frequency, restoration speed, storage capacity, utilization, and network performance—can help organizations assess the efficacy of the management strategy and adapt practices to improve their effectiveness. Continually monitoring the IT environment also enables organizations to react quickly to system and network issues to keep systems functioning smoothly.
• Document everything:
  Documenting the infrastructure management strategy, including individual assets, is essential. This information provides a playbook for the IT team, ensuring everyone is on the same page and understands the expectations. It can also help introduce new IT hires to the environment, operational expectations, and management plan. All performed maintenance, performance metrics, and security and availability issues should also be logged to track operational effectiveness and help build a better management strategy.

Managing IT infrastructure in today's rapidly changing digital landscape is complex, and most organizations can benefit from a knowledgeable partner that can offer managed IT services. Flexential enables organizations to leverage leading-edge technologies, best practices, and data center expertise to handle everyday business issues such as growth, performance, availability, and security while achieving the agility to adapt their IT strategies to address evolving business needs quickly. According to a Total Economic Impact™ study by Forrester Consulting, these capabilities contributed to a 48% return on investment (ROI).

As a strategic infrastructure partner, Flexential offers integrated, managed infrastructure services that help organizations simplify infrastructure management. Through the FlexAnywhere® Platform—a highly connected and scalable platform with a full suite of colocation, interconnection, cloud, and managed and professional services—customers have access to the robust, secure data center services needed to build powerful hybrid IT environments that support business objectives.

Offering a series of managed services—including infrastructure managers, managed IT security services, and managed network services—Flexential allows organizations to offload data center infrastructure management to certified experts who follow regimented maintenance and refresh schedules to ensure the availability, performance, and security of the environment. With Flexential managing the data center, organizations' internal teams can focus on the core business. Organizations can also leverage Flexential certified professionals to support their collocated servers and management processes, including building, managing, and maintaining their IT environments and supporting compliance obligations.

As organizations continue to rely on technology to operate their businesses and achieve competitive advantages, the performance and reliability of the IT environment will become increasingly important, making the management of the infrastructure vital. Organizations can bolster uptime and performance through effective management while better aligning the IT strategy with corporate priorities to strengthen business capabilities and drive added value.

Ready to leverage Flexential to support your IT infrastructure? Schedule a consultation today.