What is IT Infrastructure Management?

Infrastructure refers to the set of structures that are required for the operation of a location, physical facility or business operation. On a national or municipal level, the term infrastructure refers to things like roads, sewers and drainage systems, water treatment facilities, bridges, tunnels, public transportation systems, airports, storage facilities, and other components. In a physical facility like an office building, physical infrastructure consists of lighting, electricity, plumbing, alarm systems, electronic access, and other features. The commonality here is that both physical and virtual infrastructure components are used by the people who manage them to deliver services that are crucial to the overall function and operations that characterize each location.

IT Infrastructure management is sometimes divided into three components: systems management, storage management, and network management. There are several defined categories of IT infrastructure elements that must be managed to ensure that critical applications remain available. The availability of cloud services has changed the way organizations manage their IT infrastructure, with an increasing number of Infrastructure management tasks being outsourced to third-party managed service providers (MSPs). IT Organizations can also invest in cloud-based infrastructure management tools to help simplify and streamline their infrastructure management activities.

Benefits Of IT Infrastructure Management

IT infrastructure management enables your business to optimize the productivity of your people. Efficient IT infrastructure management helps improve the performance of technology systems, increases up time, and enhances the user’s experience.

Performance Enhancing
Monitoring your systems allows you to better manage performance and makes strategic changes to proactively respond to issues and limitations in your tech. When done well, the goal is to anticipate and plan for future needs while maintaining predictability and minimizing downtime.
Proactively managing IT infrastructure can ensure a positive experience for your employees. Consistent up time and high-performing technology will translate directly into an increase in productivity and positive user-experience, helping to improve employee happiness and enabling your business to scale efficiently .When your technology isn’t performing well it has downstream effects clients can often detect. Efficient and timely IT infrastructure maintains goodwill and productivity with your clients. Consistent IT infrastructure ensures that your employees can continue to add value to the business and the clients they serve. Fewer interruptions caused by technology allow all channels to remain productive, increase morale, and build an overall sense of trust.

Optimized Investments
Proactive IT infrastructure management will guarantee that your systems are running at maximum performance levels for longer than a system without proper management. Adhering to best practices like maintenance & update schedules, documentation protocols, monitoring your infrastructure, etc. will ensure your IT investments fulfill their expected life cycle. Being proactive with your infrastructure management will save your company time and money you can save money during and after issues are resolved. IT infrastructure management also optimizes investments in other areas, such as licensing. Having thorough documentation and management of the organization’s software, licensing, and subscriptions helps ensure you’re fully using what you pay for and not paying for what you don’t use. Monitoring for issues can often allow you to address small dilemmas before they become giant issues that wreak havoc on your business create costly problems and contribute to wasted investments.

Overhead Reduction
When you adopt IT infrastructure management best practices, your business can run more smoothly. Applying IT best practices to procedures, documentation & inventory management, knowledge bases, monitoring, and management systems allows IT resources to work at optimal efficiency. Your IT people spend less time running around reacting to one fire after another and more time mitigating risks. In other words, it allows for a smaller team to manage more effectively and still deliver predictable results. You can succeed with less IT staff (and less IT payroll). Framework IT has developed its own unique set of best practices in over 10 years of analyzing IT management data from hundreds of clients across dozens of industries. Our Evolution Framework incentivizes adherence to best practices so as your technology infrastructure improves your business is rewarded. This analysis proved that clients adhering to this set of best practices achieved far better, measurable results from their technology. There were fewer issues and if there was a problem it became easier, quicker, and cheaper to resolve. The best practice environment doesn’t require as much reactive IT support. For example, we found that clients with best-practice IT infrastructure and IT infrastructure management fully adopted cost about 50% less to manage. Our best practices allow organizations to take a more strategic view of technology and makes it an asset rather than a drain or concern.