IT Infrastructure - definition & overview

An organization's IT infrastructure (also known as information technology infrastructure) includes all of the hardware, software, and network resources that are necessary to deliver IT services within the organization. IT infrastructure can be used to deliver services or resources within an organization, or externally, to the organization's customers. IT infrastructure is used by software application developers to enable their specific development methodology, or by many other types of organizations as a means of driving efficiency and value-creation through the adoption of technology.

The purpose of IT infrastructure is to provide information technology teams with the structure to efficiently manage all technology and tools used by a company. This is done with the ultimate goal to minimize downtime of products and systems, as well as providing security and scalability. IT infrastructure components can be deployed, organized and implemented in a variety of ways. A typical IT infrastructure may include some or all of the following components.

Hardware refers to the physical IT infrastructure needed for delivering IT services. This category includes data centers, servers, network hubs, routers, and computers (as well as laptops, tablets, mobile devices and other "network endpoints"). These are all individual pieces of hardware in the context of an IT infrastructure, but each of these devices contains its own physical components that support its function (hard drives, RAM, motherboard, etc.). At the level of IT infrastructure, we need to know what machines we have available and what their capabilities are to support effective IT management.

Software applications provide the interface and instructions that make our hardware do what we want it to. There are millions of applications that can form part of the IT infrastructure, but there are certain categories of software that we see commonly implemented in the business context:

• Operating system software is installed on network endpoint devices and provides an accessible user interface for computing operations.
• Customer relationship management (CRM) software is used by many organizations to track customer relationships and interactions, helping to facilitate and improve sales and customer service activities. Many organizations use a purpose-built, industry-specific CRM to meet their unique business needs.
• IT operators and security analysts can use security analytics to monitor the health and security status of the IT infrastructure.

Networking enables connectivity between business machines, enabling important functions such as internet access, integrated security monitoring, configuration management, device access management and other objectives and services.

The role of IT infrastructure management is to administer and manage technology tools proactively. This means monitoring for errors and issues, tracking fixes, and tracing all errors back to initial sources. The role of IT infrastructure security has become more complex as companies have moved to cloud models, hybrid models, multi-cloud, and more.

As computers have become increasingly important in many business models across industry verticals, IT organizations have expanded their IT infrastructure and concurrently developed methodologies and best-practice frameworks for managing IT infrastructure. We can readily identify three areas of management that have evolved from the need to maximize the value generated through IT assets: ITOM, ITSM and ITAM.

What is IT operations management (ITOM)?

ITOM refers to the set of tools and processes used to maintain the IT infrastructure and ensure its availability, reliability and effectiveness on behalf of the business. IT operations managers set policies that govern how IT infrastructure will be serviced and supported and how issues with IT infrastructure should be resolved. ITOM includes network asset discovery, operational intelligence and data collection, network event management, orchestration and cloud management.

What is IT service management (ITSM)?

The managerial discipline known as ITSM emerged from the need to better align the IT organization's services with the business's needs. IT services include a huge number of activities, from resetting passwords to configuring hardware for users. ITSM includes all the activities needed to manage IT services throughout their life cycle. The IT service life cycle begins with a strategic decision to implement a given service and is followed by service design, creation, deployment and eventual service operation.

What is IT asset management (ITAM)?

As organizations accumulate more IT assets, they face a growing need to manage and optimize those assets' purchase, deployment, utilization, and end-of-life disposition. This is exactly what the discipline of ITAM is all about - life cycle management for IT infrastructure, including hardware and software. IT asset management combines three disciplines to achieve this:

Financial - The core objective of ITAM is to optimize IT expenses. This means getting the best value when purchasing new IT infrastructure, ensuring that new IT investments are cost-justified and recovering costs through end-of-life disposal.

Inventory - IT asset managers maintain control and oversight of the IT infrastructure, including an inventory of IT assets. Accurate inventory helps IT organizations make informed purchasing decisions and identify opportunities to negotiate bulk purchase discounts when purchasing IT infrastructure.

Contractual - IT asset managers oversee the management of software license agreements, cloud service agreements and other contracts related to IT infrastructure. The objective is to minimize waste (unused licenses, etc.) and maintain compliance with agreed service levels.

Depending on your internal IT team size, outsourcing to IT infrastructure management companies may reap cost savings compared to internal management and scaling your internal team. This can reduce payroll and human capital costs and deliver internal expertise and deployment of systems and monitoring faster. One of the main barriers to establishing IT infrastructure is the cost associated with purchasing new equipment. For businesses that rely on IT infrastructure for their core functions, expanding IT infrastructure by leasing a data center, purchasing physical hardware such as servers and network endpoints, and configuring and maintaining a network is expensive.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is a cloud service delivery model where IT organizations can purchase virtualized computing resources from a third-party provider and access them over the Internet. These resources typically include networking, storage space, servers, and virtual computing environments where customers can deploy applications or run workloads.

Rather than purchasing, configuring and maintaining the IT infrastructure needed to support a workload, a business can lease the required IT infrastructure from a cloud services provider on an on-demand, pay-as-you-go basis. IaaS enables more companies to access more computing power at a lower price than ever before. Some of the best-known cloud service providers that offer IaaS include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace Open Cloud and Digital Ocean.

As organizations increase the number of applications they deploy in the cloud, it can become more difficult to manage and correlate security events on the network to respond to incidents and identify security threats effectively. Sumo Logic offers a security analytics platform that pulls event logs from everywhere in your IT infrastructure and integrates them into a single dashboard, streamlining the process of monitoring your security posture and investigating potential threats.

How does data storage differ between traditional infrastructure and modern IT infrastructure architecture?

In traditional IT infrastructure, data storage is primarily based on on-premise servers and storage devices within the organization's physical premises. This setup often involves storage area networks (SAN) or network-attached storage (NAS) solutions. On the other hand, modern IT infrastructures leverage cloud storage services, which offer scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency.

Cloud storage allows data to be stored and managed remotely on the provider's infrastructure, eliminating the need for on-premise hardware maintenance and upgrades. Modern IT infrastructures may also employ hybrid cloud storage solutions, combining the benefits of both on-premise and cloud storage for optimal performance and data accessibility.

How does hyper-converged infrastructure differ from traditional data center setups?

Hyper-converged infrastructure differs from traditional data center setups by integrating computing, storage, and networking components into a single appliance. This consolidation simplifies management, reduces physical space requirements and enhances scalability compared to the siloed approach of traditional data centers. Hyper-converged infrastructure offers greater flexibility, improved efficiency and easier scaling through its software-defined architecture. In contrast, traditional data center setups typically involve separate hardware for different functions, leading to more complexity and management overhead.