A Resilient IT Infrastructure is Essential for Continuity and Security
Digital information has become the currency of the 21st century and has created the need for an IT infrastructure capable of ensuring continuity and security. Information technology is constantly evolving to meet the changing needs of our modern society.
Take storage capacity, for example. Early personal computers first used removable floppy discs with a maximum capacity of 2.88 MB. Even the internal hard drives of the early ’80s could only accommodate 10MB. Later developments include compact optical discs and USB flash drives with added capacity. Today, many compact laptop computers have solid-state drives with terabyte capabilities.
However, storage capacity for home users is virtually insignificant when compared with that required by banks and similar bulk data centres. Furthermore, their requirements are constantly expanding, thus creating an ongoing need for efficient infrastructure management.
Security is a crucial aspect of managing IT infrastructure
Maintaining adequate storage capacity is just one aspect of data management. The invaluable nature of personal data has made it a target for would-be profiteers. Unlike cash and other valuables, it is not stored in thick-walled steel vaults with combination or time locks but on servers. Thieves could break into your server room and steal the hardware, while a skilled hacker could acquire your client’s data remotely from any point on the planet.
Fortunately, there are effective countermeasures to safeguard a company’s IT Infrastructure and prevent both types of invasion. Like most aspects of information technology, security measures are constantly evolving to adapt to change. It is, therefore, advisable to retain a specialist in infrastructure management to ensure IT continuity and security.
What Does IT Infrastructure Management Involve?
To maintain the continuity and security of an IT department, one must have expertise in three main areas – systems management, network management, and storage management. We will now examine each of these in more detail.
Systems Management:
In this category, the focus is on managing security measures, such as methods to detect and prevent intrusions and logging. Centralising the latter will help simplify the correlation and analysis processes to provide real-time forensic details across multiple platforms regarding performance issues that might require attention. Log management is also a reliable means to help troubleshoot development problems like code quality before new applications are rolled out.
Network Management:
Networking has been one of the most impactful advances in computing, enabling data sharing and collaboration within an office or planetwide. The components of a local area network may be wired or communicate wirelessly, while the latter option is essential for wide-area systems. Either way, networks are potentially vulnerable to intrusions, so security measures like firewalls and virtual private networks (VPN) have become crucial aspects of an IT infrastructure management programme.
Other tasks in this category include hierarchical access control to specified applications and logging statistics like user identity, time, and duration of access. Configuring networks to allocate resources efficiently is also necessary to maintain the availability and quality of each networked service.
Storage Management:
Adequate data storage space is essential for any organisation’s IT department to function effectively. Consequently, storage management is a crucial element of the IT infrastructure management process that requires continuous oversight.
Techniques like automatic storage and data compression are now available to improve data centre performance. In addition, virtualisation and automation technologies are designed to reallocate storage space if and when required. Also, mirroring and replication offer ways to counter the risk of data losses and theft.
Getting Expert Help with Managing Your IT Infrastructure
We at CCI Technologies are an established industry leader with over 35 years of experience in providing cutting-edge solutions to meet the evolving demands of wireless networks, cabling infrastructure, and power management to businesses in South Africa. If you have any concerns about your data security, storage, or networking, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
