A Successful Cloud Migration Begins With IT Infrastructure Assessment

A strategic IT infrastructure assessment is not just a checklist exercise; it’s a pivotal component of a forward-thinking business strategy. By clearly defining goals and objectives, organizations can align their technology endeavors with broader business planning. This alignment ensures that the IT infrastructure isn't just a support system but a driving force behind achieving business outcomes. The assessment then becomes a compass, guiding decision-makers towards technological investments that resonate with the overall business vision.

Your IT infrastructure is a dynamic ecosystem encompassing hardware, software and networking. It takes a lot of expertise to curate this ecosystem and communicating the finer points can really bog down the assessment process. So, to get started you will need to create a roadmap that serves as a reference point for the technical and non-technical stakeholders, keeping your assessment aligned with the goals and objectives needed to achieve desired business outcomes.

Your roadmap should diagram high-level outcomes with their supporting functions, bringing clarity to prioritization for decision makers. For the technical stakeholders, the roadmap will form the context of the assessment by providing meaningful insight into current values versus what outcome is desired.

Failure to define performance expectations can result in unclear service level agreements (SLAs) and performance benchmarks. With clear goals and KPIs, decision-making becomes more data-driven and aligned with the desired outcomes. This clarity helps teams prioritize tasks and allocate resources effectively. Regularly monitoring KPIs allows for continuous improvement. Teams can identify areas of concern, address issues promptly and optimize processes for ongoing success.

Roadmap in hand, a thorough inventory of your IT assets can be eye-opening. This includes cataloging hardware assets such as servers and workstations, taking note of every device contributing to the ecosystem. Software assets, from critical applications to the licenses governing their use, are equally vital. Simultaneously, a detailed overview of your network infrastructure, encompassing topology and configuration details paints a holistic picture of your IT landscape.

What about data? Not the servers it is stored in, but the information itself. Blind spots in your IT infrastructure assessment can cripple momentum and undermine business outcomes. Best practices, standard operating procedures (SOP) and standard maintenance procedures (SMP) all support your infrastructure and should be included in the assessment.  Not assessing or not fully assessing your current infrastructure can lead to a cascade of challenges and setbacks. 

For example, legacy applications often have intricate interdependencies that when unidentified can lead to functionality issues, data inconsistencies and system failures following system changes. You might experience performance bottlenecks due to suboptimal resource allocation, diminished application performance and increased latency.

Inadvertently exposed sensitive data or overlooked compliance requirements could result in regulatory non-compliance, data breaches and reputational damage, posing severe risks to the organization. Without a clear understanding of your current resource utilization and workload patterns, you may over-provision or under-provision resources, impacting both budget and operational efficiency. 

Efficiency is the lifeblood of IT infrastructure. Assessing hardware performance involves scrutinizing the utilization of CPU, memory and network bandwidth. Understanding application response times and identifying resource-intensive processes ensures optimal performance. Simultaneously, capacity planning provides a glimpse into the future, allowing organizations to scale resources judiciously, ensuring that growth doesn't outpace infrastructure capabilities.

Assessing security in your infrastructure must be done with future needs in mind. A security system that cannot scale with your demand is a bottleneck for business and therefore (due to a conflict in interest) not secure. Evaluating your infrastructure’s security measures, from firewall configurations to intrusion detection systems, is important to ensure compliance with industry regulations, too.

In addition, performing a comprehensive risk assessment unveils potential cybersecurity threats and paves the way for robust business continuity planning. Identifying points of failure within the infrastructure and subsequently implementing redundancy strategies and mitigation plans, fortifies your organization against unforeseen disruptions.

An infrastructure assessment is only as good as the actionable insights it provides. The data from the assessment should be compiled with the roadmap to provide a comprehensive report that offers stakeholders direct paths between changes and the business outcomes they support. 

Assessing your IT infrastructure is not a one-time event; it's an ongoing commitment to adaptability and excellence. As your business evolves, the roadmap will need to be updated. As technology advances, the ongoing assessments will keep business outcomes supported. Businesses that proactively evaluate and enhance their IT backbone will remain resilient amongst emerging technologies and changing markets. While a proper IT infrastructure assessment can be an intimidating task, you are not alone. Experts from around the world have brought together services and support to make the process easier.

CDW’s Cloud Readiness Assessment (CRA) is designed to help your organization decide if cloud adoption and migration aligns with your business goals and objectives. An experienced team of cloud architects will evaluate your organizational readiness across a spectrum of topics, ranging from current operating models to governance and security requirements.

In addition, our experts perform a detailed analysis of your existing IT infrastructure and application portfolio. With the data we collect, we create a comprehensive gap analysis, total cost of ownership (TCO) calculations and migration strategies. Then, you can leverage the output to align executive leadership and key stakeholders on transformation goals, to build cost-efficient migration strategies and make data-backed decisions

Using CDW’s decades of experience helping our customers adapt to changing trends in technology, our teams will work closely with your key stakeholders to identify roadblocks to a successful cloud journey. Through the lens of people, processes and technology, we provide a thorough gap analysis, comparing your organization’s unique position with industry best practices and frameworks using our extensive experience with cloud migrations. Together, we’ll develop a business case and strategy for cloud migration that is low risk, cost efficient and aligned with your business requirements and goals.