Useful dashboards can elevate data analysis tasks, and bridge the gap between data and action. Viewers should be able to look at a dashboard and go, “I understand what’s going on and exactly what I need to do now.”
Published Date: October 4, 2022
IT infrastructure for an enterprise organization is all the components necessary to power IT operations for business needs, from servers to software to desktop computers, as well as the networking components that link them together. Because IT infrastructure is a broad term, the elements within it and the ways they work together are constantly evolving. Keeping ahead of those changes and maintaining the efficiency, effectiveness and safety of the IT infrastructure is the job of the IT department.
However, the duties of the IT department are overseen by the IT governance team, which creates rules that the rest of the IT services teams follow. Enterprise architecture puts those rules in practice in ways that include architecture guidance documentation, analysis of alternatives for buying new IT resources, gating committees for approving new code against rulesets, software and hardware portfolio review and decommissioning of overlapping or underused resources.
- Administration includes maintaining an organization’s computer infrastructure, adding and assisting new users, performing software upgrades, maintaining licenses, overseeing compliance with applicable laws, guarding the network against potential threats and maintaining data storage.
- Technical support includes purchasing and installing hardware and software, maintaining hardware and software, assisting users with real-time issues, managing assets, performing backup and recovery services, troubleshooting network issues, maintaining telephone systems and other hardware and software-related services.
- Communications involves the hardware and software related to email, video and web conferencing systems and the administration of accounts for each, ensuring the security of those systems, assisting users and providing planning advice for administrators.
- Programming involves creating and maintaining business applications, creating and maintaining databases and various other tasks related to the development and maintenance of software.
- Website services include developing and maintaining the company website as well as intranet sites.
In this article, we’ll discuss the components of IT infrastructure, what they are and how they work together, as well as the three primary types of IT infrastructure: the traditional, on-premises infrastructure, the cloud and hybrid infrastructures.
What are some examples of IT infrastructure?
IT infrastructure is a broad term that encompasses a wide range of information technology equipment, hardware and software, as well as networks and facilities.
Physical hardware includes laptops, routers and data centers while software includes firewalls, applications and data analytics.
Examples of physical hardware can include:
- Desktop computers
- Laptops
- Servers
- Data centers
- Hubs
- Routers
- Switches
Examples of software components can include:
- Operating systems
- Web server software applications
- Firewalls
- Function-specific software platforms such as:
- Apps
- Customer relationship management (CRM)
- Content management systems (CMS)
- Enterprise resource planning (ERP)
- Database management
- Data analytics
- IT operations management (ITOM)
- Security
A network consists of any two or more computers or devices linked together in order to share resources. Networks are usually defined by the area they encompass. There are many types of networks (including the internet itself). Typical enterprise networks include:
- Local area networks (LAN)
- Wide area networks (WAN)
- Metropolitan area network (MAN)
- Enterprise private networks (EPN)
- Virtual private networks (VPN)
Facilities are the physical plant of IT infrastructure, the rooms (including server rooms and data centers) that hold the equipment, as well as the network cabling and related components that connect the entire IT environment together.
What are the main types of IT infrastructure ?
The three main types of IT infrastructure are cloud, on-premises and hybrid infrastructures.
On-premises infrastructure: In traditional IT infrastructure, the components of IT infrastructure, including data centers, data storage and the network equipment used to connect the components, is owned by the organization and located on premises (often abbreviated as “on prem”). The IT department was responsible for maintaining all aspects of traditional infrastructure and the demands were greater due to the increased amount of equipment and upgrading or changing infrastructure components. On-premises infrastructure also makes it necessary for the organization to provide the physical space to house the data centers and other components.
Cloud infrastructure: Cloud infrastructure is mostly located outside of an organization’s location (“off-prem”), sometimes in a private cloud built entirely by the organization, or in a public cloud — a data center owned by a third-party cloud services provider such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google. A third-party cloud infrastructure relieves the organization of the necessity of maintaining large and expensive data centers as well as much of the equipment necessary to run the IT infrastructure. Also, because the infrastructure is built on servers owned and maintained by a third-party provider that offers nearly unlimited capacity, it’s easy to secure and provision additional server space when the organization’s needs grow, or when they want to introduce a new service or capability to employees or customers.
Hybrid infrastructure: Many enterprises use a hybrid cloud approach to infrastructure, in large part because moving to the cloud requires planning and a measured strategy. Organizations may move some aspects of their IT infrastructure, such as data storage, to a cloud-based infrastructure, while maintaining some of their hardware and software on their own on-premises networks. Organizations in the healthcare or financial services industries, for instance, who are required to follow strict information security guidelines, may opt to store sensitive information on premises. Organizations whose business operations rely heavily on large, server-based applications, may require additional time and planning to move these services to their cloud or multicloud environment.
How does IT infrastructure relate to hardware?
Hardware is an essential component of IT infrastructure. From desktop computers to printers to routers, these physical hardware components are the tools that turn the infrastructure's connectivity into business-related activities. Without physical components, an IT infrastructure would have no real-world presence that could be turned into actual work output.
What are the different levels of IT infrastructure?
While there are many definitions of “IT infrastructure,” different levels of IT infrastructure typically refer to public, enterprise and business units.
Public IT infrastructure: The public IT infrastructure consists of networks and equipment available to the public, some owned by state, local or municipal governments, some owned by private enterprise and made available for use by the public. The public IT infrastructure includes internet connections, the public switched telephone network (i.e. traditional, landline telephone services), cellular networks and cable systems.
Enterprise IT infrastructure: Enterprise IT infrastructure includes the hardware, software, networks and IT facilities used by enterprise organizations to conduct business. They also include email, web sites, intranets and private cloud networks running software-as-a-service (SaaS) business applications.
Business unit IT infrastructure: Individual business units or departments within an organization can have their own IT infrastructure that supports the hardware and software specific to their function: supply-chain management software, for instance, or customer relationship management (CRM) platforms for marketing and sales teams. Manufacturing business units will have their own software platforms, including computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM). The finance department will have payroll, invoicing and other business systems. All of these business-unit specific applications (and many more) and their related peripheral devices fall under the heading of business unit IT infrastructure.
What is the difference between network infrastructure and IT infrastructure?
Network infrastructure refers specifically to the hardware, software and systems that allow desktop computers, servers, peripherals and other components to communicate safely and effectively with one another, either inside or outside the organization.
IT infrastructure is a larger category that includes all of the network infrastructure of an organization plus all of the hardware and software, related telecommunications equipment, video and teleconferencing systems and all of the other systems inside the organization maintained by the IT department.
Network infrastructure is crucial to the operation of a modern IT infrastructure in that it provides the foundation for communication among all of an organization’s systems and for the organization to communicate with the outside world.
What is IT Infrastructure for networking components?
IT infrastructure for networking components is another subset of the larger category of IT infrastructure. Network infrastructure devices are the components of a network that transport communications needed for data, applications, services and multimedia. These devices include routers, firewalls, switches, servers, load-balancers, intrusion detection systems, domain name systems and storage area networks.
What is IT Infrastructure for data storage?
IT infrastructure for data storage refers to the hardware, software and networking components used as part of an organization’s data storage system. This can include hardware like servers, software like databases and database management systems and physical locations such as server rooms and data centers. IT infrastructure for data storage is one component of an organization’s overall IT infrastructure.
In a traditional, on-premises infrastructure, this term will refer to the physical servers located onsite and the software and equipment that supports them. In a cloud infrastructure, this category also includes virtual servers and equipment located off premises and accessed by the organization remotely.
What is the role of IT infrastructure services?
IT infrastructure services can refer to several different things. A list of IT infrastructure services inside an organization includes:
- Administration
- Technical support
- Communications
- Programming
- Website services
How does IT infrastructure management relate to Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas)?
IT infrastructure services can also refer to the practice of outsourcing IT infrastructure monitoring, analysis, maintenance and other key functions to a third party. Decision frameworks vary by enterprise size and other factors. Small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are more likely to outsource monitoring, analysis and maintenance services, whereas larger, enterprise organizations are more likely to perform them in house. Outsourcing is also more common, among organizations of any size, in a cloud infrastructure environment, where services may be outsourced along with the infrastructure itself — such as with infrastructure as a service (IAAS). A wide variety of vendors from small companies to major service providers offer IT infrastructure services.
What is IT infrastructure management?
The operation of an enterprise IT infrastructure is traditionally the role of the IT department, charged with maintaining the physical plant of the IT infrastructure, the network and its components, the hardware and software on which the IT infrastructure is built and the hardware and software used by an organization’s people to do their jobs. In the early days of IT departments, the role was mostly reactive, waiting for something to break or stop working. Routine maintenance was performed on a regular schedule in hopes of preventing outages.
In the modern enterprise organization, the role of the IT department has been given greater scalability by the use of data-driven IT monitoring, measurement and analytics tools that use machine learning and artificial intelligence to predict outages before they occur, allowing IT teams to proactively prevent downtime that will affect end user experience. The practice of IT operations management (ITOM) and IT operations analytics (ITOA) has been made significantly more effective through data-driven disciplines including artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) and observability.
AIOps: AIOps is the practice of applying analytics and machine learning to big data to automate and improve IT operations. AI can automatically analyze massive amounts of network and machine data to find patterns, both to identify the cause of existing problems and to predict and prevent future ones.
The term AIOps was coined by Gartner in 2016. In the “Market Guide for AIOps Platforms,” Gartner describes AIOps platforms as “software systems that combine big data and artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning functionality to enhance and partially replace a broad range of IT operations processes and tasks, including availability and performance monitoring, event correlation and analysis, IT service management and automation.”
Observability: Observability is the ability to measure the internal states of a system by examining its outputs. A system is considered “observable” if the current state can be estimated by only using information from outputs, namely sensor data. While it might seem like a recent buzzword, the term originated decades ago with control theory (which is about describing and understanding self-regulating systems). However, it has increasingly been applied to improving the performance of distributed IT systems. In this context, observability uses three types of telemetry data — metrics, logs and traces — to provide deep visibility into distributed systems through user interfaces and allow teams to get to the root cause of a multitude of issues and improve the system’s performance.
Is the future of IT infrastructure actually cloud infrastructure?
The future of IT infrastructure lies inevitably in the cloud. As more and more organizations experience the benefits of cloud computing, more and more elements of the network infrastructure will move to the cloud and become virtual (located off premises) rather than being physically located on premises. Cloud computing has proven itself to be more cost effective than traditional, on-premises infrastructure, while it also gives organizations much more flexibility in the way they provision their networks, makes it much faster to roll out new applications and software products, — through virtualization, for example — and alleviates the expense and IT burden of maintaining physical information technology infrastructure.
How can data optimize IT infrastructure?
In terms of monitoring, measuring and maintaining IT infrastructure, the future lies in data-driven practices that use machine learning and artificial intelligence to maintain the integrity and operational efficiency of the IT infrastructure’s individual components, from hardware to software and beyond. Observability is the ability to measure the internal states of a system by examining its outputs. Observability provides the best method currently available to keep IT infrastructures up and running, prevent outages and predict issues before they happen throughout the network and its various components.
IT infrastructure is one of an organization’s most important, most expensive and most fluid elements. No modern organization can succeed without an effective and efficient IT infrastructure, and no infrastructure can remain static. The needs of the organization are constantly evolving and the components of the infrastructure must evolve with it. In parallel, the importance of the IT organization continues to grow, and the tools designed to help them do their jobs are also evolving. Organizations must be able to use their own data to maximize the value they get from their infrastructures, and they must have a comprehensive and cohesive cloud infrastructure plan that defines how much of their operations should move to the cloud, what should remain on premises and how that balance will shift over time.
