Is your IT foundation a firm one?
By Davis Merrey
A great house on a weak foundation will ultimately become a nightmare to live in. Poorly designed IT environments are the same. They will perform poorly and become very expensive to maintain and use.
How can you tell if your IT foundation is firm?
Let’s continue with the house analogy. If your floors are creaking, doors don’t shut fully, or you see cracks in floor tiles, your foundation may be tilting due to shifting soil or maybe rotting timbers. Either way, repairs will eventually be required. The longer you wait, the more expensive they will become. You may even experience severe plumbing or heat and air problems as these systems fail under mechanical stress.
If you are experiencing numerous service calls with your IT service provider and things never seem to get completely fixed, it could very well be a weak IT infrastructure that is the root cause. Maybe the system was poorly designed in the first place or maybe the equipment is no longer able to handle the tasks it is being asked to do.
Just as with house repairs, the longer you wait to repair your IT foundation the more expensive it can become, and the greater the possibility that other parts of the system begin to fail. Simply sealing the cracks in the floor tiles of a home doesn’t fix the shifting foundation, and patching small pieces of your IT infrastructure won’t fix the problem either.
When it comes to resolving a shifting foundation on a house, it’s not really possible to tear down the entire house and rebuild the foundation. Instead, piers are used to provide substantial support to the foundation and prevent it from further shifting.
To resolve a shaky IT foundation, sometimes the answer is to tear it down and start over, especially if it’s failing because it was poorly designed. Other times, an approach similar to piers around a house may work, where certain features are added to improve the stability of the existing system.
How do you know which approach is best? An IT professional can help evaluate your full system and make recommendations on what actions are needed to create a firm foundation for future growth.