Everyone talks about the digital transformation, but have you considered your digital infrastructure? Your digital infrastructure is the foundation of your digital transformation. This can include physical items such as, server hardware, network equipment, laptops and phones. This can also include your non-physical items, such as software, inventory, configurations and databases.
Like traditional infrastructure such as an office building, it needs to be large enough for your company to use with some extra room for growth, secure enough so that you can keep things safe inside, and well maintained so that the power and cooling can be reliable and provide your employees a comfortable place to work.
The same goes for your digital infrastructure. There are 3 key things that can hold it back if there’s not enough of it.
- Scalability
- Security
- Suboptimal Maintenance
All of these have a cost, so every organization needs to consider how much they value each, they’ll gain from each, and how much they’re willing to spend. Like physical infrastructure, you may care about security more if you were thinking of opening a bank, or you may prioritize scalability if you were trying to open a manufacturing plant for a brand new product.
Symptoms Your Organization is Suffering:
Scalability
Your organization is growing, or you’ve come up with solid business objectives. However, there are problems when it comes to IT doing their part. The whole company has to wait for IT to catch up. Changes to the system take longer and may cost more than expected. Sometimes your IT team outright refuses to take on more projects because they’re too busy.
Without scalability, a compromise has to be chosen between either:
- Paying a premium on an oversized solution to be prepared for tomorrow’s problems
- Saving on a solution that solves today’s problems only but doesn’t account for growth
If your digital infrastructure was built with scalability in mind, a roadmap to increase capacity would already be part of the design. Adding additional capacity or capabilities could be trivial if scalability was already built in. This eliminates the need to overprovision when accounting for future demand, which not only makes your spending more efficient but also translates into cost savings.
Tips on Improving Scalability:
- Installing infrastructure that scales well
- Adopting virtualization
- Leveraging Cloud
- Identify which products are the right fit for your organization
- Creating and employing templates to speed deployment times
- Adopt SDWAN
- IT documentation
- Adopt naming standards
- Design with future growth in mind
- IPAM with an IP addressing scheme
Security
Having your organization’s assets secure is critical to maintaining operations. If an office were to experience a single security breach and inventory or files were damaged or stolen, the organization could lose days, weeks, or even months of work having to recover.
Protecting digital assets can be just as important and the negative impacts can be just as harmful. Since it isn’t something you can always touch and feel, it’s easy for this issue to remain hidden until a breach occurs. Our digital assets are more accessible and easier to copy compared to our physical assets. This presents a lot more opportunities for them to be stolen and can make securing them a challenge.
Going to extremes such as having armed guards may make sense for some organizations, but it’s always important to ensure that the basics are covered first. This can be as simple as locking doors, asking to see the company badge of someone unfamiliar in a restricted area, or adopting a clean desk policy, keeping important files locked away.
The same can be said for Digital Infrastructure. There’s a lot of basics that can be covered first to improve security dramatically.
Tips on Improving Your Security
- Install and configure firewall for perimeter security
- Installing a network firewall alone is not enough for perimeter security, it needs to be configured to meet your organizations specific environment and needs
- Implement Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) on your firewalls
- Adopt a Zero Trust architecture
- Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)
- Site to site VPNs to bridge office networks together, while maintaining privacy and security
- Remote access VPN such as GlobalProtect or AnyConnect
- Best practices assessments
- Work with a third party or use a best practices document to review network configurations and provide recommendations
- Examples:
- Use secure passwords
- Block unwanted and unsolicited traffic from the internet
- Restrict access to only devices that need it
- Examples:
- Work with a third party or use a best practices document to review network configurations and provide recommendations
- Penetration Testing
Poor Maintenance
Everyone in the organization is consistently disrupted due to issues such as the payment system going down, the internet is unreachable, or being unable to print. On days when the system is working, pages can load slowly, the WiFi can feel fast or slow and seems to change unpredictably, or system crashes and errors are commonplace.
Your IT team is swamped with issues and doesn’t have the capacity to deal with them, even after hiring additional staff. They’re too busy mopping the floors to stop all the leaks. Left unchecked, technical issues can quickly boil up and become business failures. See Responsible Tech Debt
When being proactive about maintenance, you get to decide when to do the maintenance on your own terms. When neglected, the systems you rely on choose for you.
Tips on Promoting Better Health in Your Digital Infrastructure
- Adopt a High-Availability (HA) architecture
- Create redundancies in the system that automatically take over, so that individual failures within the system go unnoticed
- Install a Network Monitoring System (NMS)
- This makes it possible to proactively determine system status, not relying on emails or tickets
- Take a step further and monitor that HA is in place, and all redundancies are functioning. Without monitoring, you only know about the straw the broke the camel’s back, not all the other ones underneath.
- Install a IP Address Manager (IPAM)
- Keep track of inventory and address space used
- Create backups
- Backups of data
- Backups of configuration
- Follow Change Control
- Have a formal process in which everyone assesses risk, communicates to parties involved, and schedules a time before proceeding with changes to Digital Infrastructure.
- Install a AAA system to provide your IT team visibility and accountability into changes made
Any of this sound familiar? We’ve seen it before and we’re here to help.
Each organization has its unique sets of problems, challenges, and needs. There’s so many different options out there, with all of them having their own strengths and weaknesses. It’s very easy to underspend or overspend in another of the 3 key areas.
We can help guide your organization in helping make better decisions.
Services We Offer
With each organization having its own unique needs and challenges, there’s no silver bullet solution for every problem out there. Schedule a meeting with us, and we can review your infrastructure and work together to determine what changes would provide the most value to your business and come up with a personalized plan for your business on how to best deliver these results.
Scalability
- Infrastructure Redesign
- Physical to Virtual migration
- Cloud Migration
- Capacity planning
- System deployment, with documentation, templates, and maintenance plan included
- Infrastructure discovery and documentation
- Automation Tools and training
Security
- Firewalls
- Palo Alto Networks
- Cisco Meraki
- Cisco Firepower and ASA
- VPNs
- Site to site VPNs to bridge office networks together, while maintaining privacy and security
- Remote access VPN such as GlobalProtect or AnyConnect
- Best practices assessments
- Review network configurations and provide recommendations to build security into the design
- Penetration Testing
Maintenance
- Network Monitoring System (NMS)
- Initial Setup
- Consultation on how to improve current monitoring and reduce noise
- IPAM
- Infoblox
- Netbox
- Redundant Designs
- Best practices assessment
- Risk assessment
- Network configuration backups, changes visibility and change control
For further inquires, feel free to contact us:
Comments are closed