"An effective 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."
“Where IT Infrastructure and Business Strategy Meet”, The McKinsey Quarterly, May 2009
Do you have a coherent infrastructure blueprint and is it sustainable? How will you manage change?
Enterprise architecture/infrastructure design and consulting fundamentally focuses on the design of business architecture and its alignment with underlying technology elements that form the foundation on which enterprise operations rely to run the IT environment. The technology surrounding this area includes a broad category of architectures and assets used to store and access data, as well as connectivity and transport.
Infrastructure and IT operations are usually the single largest portions of overall IT budgets, ranging from 60% to 70% of overall IT spending. Therefore, many companies should be investing in the analysis of their enterprise architecture and infrastructure designs to find sources of savings and/or determine the impact of new disruptive options, including virtualization, cloud computing or infrastructure utility.
The main benefit that organizations derive from architectural initiatives is an impact analysis, whereby a quantitative business case analysis of savings and an overall road map for potential changes in the enterprise architecture or infrastructure operations result. With the business case and roadmap in hand, organizations can make change decisions related to economic and budgetary realities, compliance issues and other market forces affecting their businesses. The analysis and action plan are also used to investigate and assimilate new, disruptive technologies, solutions or paradigm shifts to regain or maintain competitive parity with industry rivals, as well as gaining competitive advantage.