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You cannot have a successful business without a robust IT infrastructure. It is imperative to have an IT infrastructure that is both modern and reliable to do business and achieve your goals. Yet, an out-of-date, low-quality system can be a headache that undermines productivity, efficiency, and work quality. Maintaining and upgrading your IT infrastructure frequently is essential due to constantly changing customer expectations, fluctuating data volumes, increasing network traffic, regulatory requirements, and many other aspects of your business. Stagnation is the last thing any business wants to experience. If you don't treat your IT infrastructure as a priority, you may severely limit your company's potential. In ITSM, there is no universal approach, but there are ways to build ITSM processes that are specific to your organization. While ITSM is easily recognizable in places where it exists, the formula for achieving it does not exist for any organization. 

As a trend dating back to the '90s, 3-tier architecture has been a business staple ever since. Although the Internet revolutionized business, today's organizations need scalability, flexibility, and agility to stay competitive. Businesses must move IT out of the data center and remain at the forefront of innovation if they hope to remain competitive.

Before we deep dive into this topic, let's understand more about an IT infrastructure, its key elements, its importance and reasons why businesses should prioritize IT infrastructure more than ever in 2022. 

Defining IT Infrastructure

An organization's information technology infrastructure includes hardware and software components such as its facility, data centre, desktop computers, and software applications. A cohesive set of these components will allow your company to generate effective communication, efficient processes, and a productive workflow. IT operations and management must be managed by an adequate IT infrastructure. There is no single solution that can manage all IT operations and management. As with your company's uniqueness, your IT infrastructure should be tailored to meet your company's needs. 

IT infrastructure that is flexible, reliable, and secure can assist an enterprise in meeting its goals and offer a competitive advantage. Business organizations can suffer productivity and security issues if their IT infrastructure isn't implemented properly, including system failures and breaches. In general, the implementation of an effective infrastructure can predict whether or not a business will be profitable. 

An organization can benefit from an IT infrastructure by: 

1. Maintaining uninterrupted access to the website and online store will provide a positive customer experience.
   
   
2. Create solutions quickly and launch them rapidly.
   
   
3. Make quick decisions based on real-time data.
   
   
4. Enhance employee experience and productivity.
   

Insights into a Sophisticated IT Infrastructure

Having an IT infrastructure that is well managed and controlled ensures that your organization has reliable security, high speed and connectivity, full support and accessibility for your employees, and satisfaction with your clients' experience. It is critical for companies, no matter their size or industry, to place IT infrastructure management at the top of their agenda, especially in today's digitally driven world. 

As per the research of Fuse Technology Group, small businesses will continue to invest in IT infrastructure in the future, especially in business management software (50%) and data analytics (43%), mobile devices (37%), and social media (36%). The fact that the technology continues to provide growth potential for businesses of all sizes suggests that small and medium-sized businesses are leveraging it. 

Role of ITSM, ITOM, AI and ITIL

In today's highly-complex IT environment, managing sprawling estates becomes increasingly tricky. It is crucial to gain visibility across the whole infrastructure, which is where IT operations management (ITOM), IT service management (ITSM) and artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) can be helpful to - enabling a single view and enhancing overall service quality. Business needs are addressed in part by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, which offers a set of best practices for integrating IT services. With ITIL, an organization can achieve maximum business value using technology - a concept that combines principles from different management approaches, such as lean manufacturing, risk management, and organizational change management. 

Moreover, ITSM is seen as a cornerstone of IT operations and other IT operations management (ITOM) processes, such as managing applications and connectivity elements. A significant function of the service module of the ITIL framework is ITOM, which focuses on managing the capacity, performance and availability of mechanisms of an organization's IT infrastructure.

Read More: Tips to Consider When Selecting an ITSM Tool for the Future 

Maximizing IT infrastructure performance with ITSM and ITOM  

Integrating ITOM and ITSM makes it easy to manage IT infrastructure performance, availability and business metrics to adapt to changing business requirements. Platforms and tools for ITSM, for example, track the status of the components within your infrastructures, such as processes and services. The data from ITSM can easily be turned into valuable insights about business activities and operations by integrating ITSM with ITOM. 

IT teams can provide a single-window into the entire IT infrastructure and operations by integrating data from different monitoring tools and reporting from ITOM and ITSM. A real-time view of both service management and operations management is provided. Some companies use different tools to manage different elements of their infrastructure. One tool may be used for managing the performance and availability of cloud computing applications, and another for managing systems networks and infrastructures. These tools are able to generate and distribute reports by themselves, and it is assumed that they will be used to do so. However, each report can give rise to a complex picture. Organizations in such scenarios lack end-to-end visibility into their IT infrastructure and operations. It may take excessive amounts of time for IT teams to collect, compile, and analyze data from numerous reports to determine the cause of an issue.

Organizations can integrate ITOM and ITSM to manage these entities as one, aligning them with business requirements and saving time and money, both of which have a major impact on the bottom line. 

Why your IT infrastructure is so important?

You need to be aware of the growing needs of your company as it grows. Throughout all the changes you experience, a seamless IT infrastructure supports you, your employees, and your clients. When your business grows in popularity and therefore becomes more of a target for cyberattacks, your IT infrastructure will help safeguard your data. If you require new solutions as your needs change, a scalable network will adapt to your needs to offer continuous support. The modern world demands a fast, reliable, and secure system that will keep up with the constant updates and innovations the IT world offers.  

Upgrade your IT Infrastructure When These Signs Appear

It is important for your business' success that your IT infrastructure runs smoothly, which is why it makes a huge difference to the success of your business. It would help if you reevaluated your IT infrastructure regularly since IT needs are constantly changing. Inappropriate technology can adversely affect employee productivity, delay customer orders, disrupt operations, and annoy users. Unless your technology lets you grow, your business will not be able to succeed. So it is imperative that you analyze whether your existing IT infrastructure is scalable, flexible, and agile enough so that you remain competitive?

There are several signs to look out for that may signify it's time to upgrade your IT infrastructure. Here are seven signs you need to upgrade. 

1. Technological stagnation
   
   You probably need to upgrade your technology unless it is very fast. Are you having difficulty starting up your PC? Are you experiencing frequent software crashes? Are you having trouble installing programs? Are you experiencing sluggish Internet connections? Have web pages failed to load at all? Taking action on any of these points could boost your tech's efficiency.
   
   As businesses grow, many small and start-up companies adopt new technologies step by step. Even though this is a viable option given your budget and resources, it can create problems since old software can have problems communicating with new tools and platforms. The result can be slow speeds and efficiency issues- which drastically affect employee productivity. As a result, employees must spend a lot of time resolving those technical problems, resulting in a delay in work and a negative impact on the business' ROI.
   
   Relevant Article: How automation help organizations to enhance employee productivity?
   
   
2. Outdated Software
   
   In addition to being slow and out-of-date, aging software can even pose a security risk to your whole network. Cyberattacks and viruses are more common in legacy software than in new software. It is also possible for old software to not comply with industry standards.
   
   It is essential to upgrade your IT infrastructure by updating your software. New software can improve your business in several ways such as:
   
   - Better collaboration in the workplace
   
   - Security Enhancement
   
   - Saves time
   
   - Enhanced Capabilities
   
   - Improved Productivity
   
   - More Effective
   
   - Cost-Reduction
   
   - Happy and satisfied workforce
   
   It's important to keep your software up-to-date to ensure security patches are installed. In addition, you should update your software as it approaches its end of life.
   
   
3. Unreliable hardware
   
   As your organization and team grew, you acquired new hardware. Your employees likely use a range of different computers and other tools. Having inconsistent hardware can cause more than aesthetic problems. It can cause communication and collaboration issues as well. You must ensure your staff uses hardware that can easily sync, share documents, run the same software, and easily be controlled and managed by just one system because compatibility is one of the critical aspects of a smooth-running business. Focus on buying compatible hardware that syncs together when you upgrade your IT infrastructure so that your employees can share and collaborate more efficiently.
   
   
4. Insufficient storage space
   
   It's time for an IT infrastructure upgrade if you're running out of storage space. It is clear from the above that limited storage space can cause systems to slow down and servers to crash. But there are also other issues with limited storage space. Without enough storage space, your staff may not be able to save vital documents, you may lose highly valuable company data, and your team’s productivity will slow down. It's cost-effective and efficient to move your data to the cloud. The flexibility of cloud storage allows it to grow infinitely and can be added as much more rapidly than traditional storage, which requires purchasing, formatting, and installing additional servers and storage devices.
   
   
5. The cost of IT solutions is too high
   
   Updates and repairs are more expensive on older technology. Maintaining and repairing an old computer becomes an expensive process over time. To keep your systems up and to run, your IT costs shouldn't spiral out of control. Many organizations across the world follow this strategy. At the moment, they address both superficial and deeper causes of problems by using stopgap measures. Investing in a complete IT infrastructure upgrade will save you more money over the long run. By upgrading your infrastructure, you will be able to build a cohesive and efficient system.
   
   
6. Constantly crash your servers
   
   It is common for servers to crash as a result of much deeper infrastructure problems. Due to inadequate bandwidth, inadequate storage space, or inadequate processing power, servers can crash. In addition to corrupted disks, lack of proper airflow in your server room, and malware infection, you may also experience server crashes. Making sure your server infrastructure is optimized for peak operation, and growth will ensure that your servers serve your business needs.
   
   
7. Backups are unreliable
   
   Do you have a backup plan in place for your company? It's a common problem that most companies don't have. A reliable backup plan is essential if you want to safeguard your company's data in the event of a disaster, breach, or power outage.
   
   The data recovery plan of your business should include regular backups and testing. The cloud is a convenient way to store data backups at multiple geo-locations. Having this in place will give your organization the protection it needs in case of a disaster or system loss. Backups and disaster recovery plans should not be put off until it's too late. A reliable backup solution is an essential part of your IT strategy.
   
   

Conclusion 

An organization can greatly benefit from prioritizing infrastructure upgrades and investing in them. Here are some of the business benefits you must check out: 

1. Meets customers' needs
   
   A business should strive to provide value to its customers through the products and services it sells. It is an organization's website and IT infrastructure that play an essential role in generating value. It would be best if you also considered your end-users needs when developing your IT infrastructure. Investment in your IT infrastructure lets you offer your clients better products and customer service, from an online store to client relationship management software.
   
   
2. Improving time-to-market
   
   When a company has fast reaction times, setting up sales offices amidst its growing territories is beneficial. This allows them to provide seamless offline support to their customers on various channels while meeting the increasing demands of their customers. In order to achieve their goals, companies need to ensure that their IT infrastructure is strong.
   
   
3. Business flexibility and scalability
   
   Adapting to the changing needs of your business is easier with a flexible, scalable IT infrastructure. Naturally, storage capacity will grow as your business expands. How fast will your network and current hardware be able to keep up with your business's demands? Choosing a managed IT infrastructure solution can help you optimize your environment so your business can run better. When your business needs evolve, you can upgrade your capabilities, buy new software, or stay current with updates and applications. Developing a scalable IT infrastructure ensures you have reliable solutions throughout the lifecycle of your business.
   
   
4. Getting Real-Time Data
   
   A tailored IT infrastructure enables businesses to collect data in real-time and improve business processes. They help businesses operate quicker and more efficiently, thereby improving the customer experience.
   
   
5. Effectively improves employee productivity
   
   Overburdened and outdated IT infrastructure can hamper connectivity, slow processing, and create complex data storage problems. Employees will struggle to deliver their best under these conditions. Having a robust IT infrastructure should not prevent your team from delivering high-quality work. University of Warwick economists found that employee satisfaction boosts productivity by 13% while unhappy employees lose productivity by 10%.
   
   The right tools and a secure online environment are necessary to build a healthy, happy work environment for employees to conduct their sales, technical, managerial, and clerical tasks without concern. Keeping employees and customers' data safe is one of the best ways to build a positive reputation and increase employee and client satisfaction.