Would your IT infrastructure be given a clean bill of health?

If you were to compare the health of an IT environment to that of an athlete, you would find some fundamental similarities. Just as the overall health of an athlete’s body would impact his success, so too will the ‘health’ of your IT directly affect the performance benefits to your business.

So what is Healthy IT?

Ideally an IT solution should be designed to accommodate all of the functional business needs, but there are some critical elements needed to be considered truly healthy.

• Reliability; by providing an environment which ensures minimal downtime.
• Flexibility; to easily accommodate growth and change.
• The security needs of the business also need to be balanced with the associated costs, while still providing the best possible risk mitigation.

So how do we achieve Healthy IT?

In order to achieve and maintain a healthy IT environment we need to identify the goals which are specific to the business.

• At Space Age, a Solutions Consultant initiates discussions with the business to obtain an understanding of the businesses IT needs, as well as, to assess predicted growth and the IT requirements to accommodate that growth. With this we can accurately predict and plan for any changes which need to be made in order to provide a reliable, secure and flexible IT solution.
• Technical support is provided to react to existing unhealthy conditions and through proper incident management the immediate number of issues can be resolved in a short period of time. In our athlete analogy this would be treating  sprains or blisters during training or a competition.
• In order to prevent incidents from happening we need to have proper problem management, (our goal here is to identify and resolve root causes to eliminate the recurring incidents).
• Continuous monitoring of the infrastructure is therefore critical, and through the use of intelligent monitoring tools we can respond to issues as soon as they occur as well as identify symptoms before they negatively affect a business. To our athlete this would be watching him/her perform and analysing the results. Watching for incorrect strides which could lead to complications or injury and the training done specifically to avoid these issues before they become problems.

How do you keep the IT environment healthy?

With incident and problem management flowing efficiently and with clear goals being set out for the business, there are still a number of operational tasks which are crucial in maintaining a Healthy IT environment. Just like an athlete needs to train regularly and keep a healthy diet, the IT environment in a business will only stay healthy if certain proactive tasks are regularly being performed.

• Regularly applying the latest updates for your software will help maintain its security and performance while avoiding potential problems before they arise.
• Providing and managing regular backups of data and software infrastructure will help ensure minimal down time, even during disastrous events.
• Protecting your environment from continually evolving threats such as Viruses and Spyware will help ensure the integrity of your data.

Regular feedback to the Solutions Consultants also helps highlight areas which are not following the predicted business course and therefore allow them to make recommendations based on the latest trends. In this way, this pro-active approach to healthy IT provides the true value through the art of balancing the cost of Healthy IT with the long lasting benefits it provides.

Giliam Vermeulen

Backup Support