The Crucial Role of IT Infrastructure in Supporting Remote Working
To date, there have been more than seven million deaths due to infection with the coronavirus, with over half of those occurring at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the first quarter of 2022. However, the threat of infection did more than force people to protect themselves by wearing masks and staying home. Many of those housebound by government lockdown regulations whose employers had installed suitable IT infrastructure were able to continue performing their work tasks from a PC at home.
Today, new strains of the virus keep emerging and occasionally take lives. However, while acquired immunity and vaccination programmes may have limited the threat of COVID, its influence on the business world has continued. The World Wide Web has been transformed from an information superhighway into a global online supermarket generating trillions of dollars annually. Besides shopping for clothes and food, many of us now do our banking, book hotel rooms, flights, and cinema tickets, and arrange doctor’s appointments from a mobile phone.
Many businesses have recognised the benefits of leveraging e-commerce and have abandoned their brick-and-mortar stores, while others who failed to recognise them have been forced into insolvency. However, this remarkable paradigm shift would not have been possible without the servers, routers, cabling, switches, hardware, and software essential to support remote working.
The Key Elements of IT Infrastructure
The infrastructure necessary for a business to operate online is of five main types as follows:
- Hardware: Items in this category include servers, personal computers, switches, routers, and optical and solid-state hard drives for storing the data. In some businesses, such as live online customer service, headsets and webcams may also be necessary.
- Software: In addition to operating systems and databases, the software requirements for remote working will usually include tools to enable collaboration, such as Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams, Dropbox, and Basecamp.
- Networking: Besides the routers and switches mentioned earlier, other essential networking requirements include specialised cabling, racking, and environmental monitoring and control systems. The latter are crucial to prevent overheating and high levels of humidity that could compromise hardware performance.
- Data Management: Many companies maintain extensive databases to store the personal details of their customers and sensitive company data. Therefore, firewalls, anti-virus protection, and robust physical and software-based security protocols are vital.
The cost of purchasing and maintaining IT infrastructure can be steep, especially for small businesses. However, the client-server model introduced in the ‘80s, enabling multiple users to utilise web-based applications on remote servers, has been further developed and now offers a way to cut those costs – cloud computing.
Accessing IT Infrastructure in the Cloud
Most of the foundation work for the launch of cloud computing was completed in the ‘60s and ‘70s with the development of virtual machines that enabled multiple operating systems to run concurrently on a single physical server. However, it was Amazon that, in 2020, popularised this new technology with its versatile toolkit – Amazon Web Services (AWS), offering access to scalable hardware, software, and networking resources via the Internet.
The cloud eliminates the need for heavy investment in hardware and software, levelling the playing field and enabling small businesses to operate more economically by paying only for cloud-based services and resources when using them.
Whether you choose to equip, secure and maintain a physical computer network on your company’s premises or rely instead on accessing the services and resources you need from a remote service provider is a matter of personal choice. However, whatever your decision, it will pay you to employ an experienced network engineer to handle the installation or assist with the transition to cloud computing. CCI Technologies is a leading South African connectivity solutions provider with almost 40 years of experience. We specialise in networking, fibre-optic and conventional copper cabling, security, power, data centre requirements, and general IT Infrastructure. Contact us for more information.
