Design a Resilient IT Infrastructure Strategy

I&O leaders must develop flexible strategies to deploy applications and workloads seamlessly across various environments.

Key considerations for IT infrastructure

As cloud adoption matures, enterprises are shifting their focus from migration to modernization. Hybrid infrastructure is now the standard — combining compute, storage, networking and cloud platforms into a single, dynamic environment. But many I&O leaders still face foundational questions: What does good infrastructure look like? How do I modernize what I already have?

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Embracing adaptable IT infrastructure strategies

In today's agile and cloud-centric environment, change is the only constant. I&O leaders must navigate the evolving role of infrastructure by planning for a series of unknowns.

Adapting to business needs

Where? Business needs and value now dictate workload placement strategies. Specific regions may require enhanced customer intimacy, supported by local providers ensuring high availability. Alternatively, workloads may be distributed across multiple countries to comply with data sovereignty location regulations.

How much? Traditional linear growth patterns are obsolete. Enterprises must adopt agile IT infrastructure delivery models that can rapidly scale up or down in response to evolving business needs.

For how long? IT infrastructure components may be required for varying durations — years, months or hours — depending on workload and business needs. Clearly defining platforms and services, along with their requirements, helps reduce complexity and avoid single-use solutions that are difficult and expensive to manage.

Quickly deploy solutions to seize market opportunities and meet business demands. The traditional approach of designing and deploying complex, best-of-breed solutions hinders agile IT infrastructure.

Avoid risk through agility

Minimize cost. As workload requirements evolve, physical requirements at any site may also change. The ability to quickly scale up or down is a key advantage of an on-demand or consumption-based allocation model.

Avoid downtime. Downtime and risk are critical factors in deployment models for client-facing workloads. In today's social media-driven world, a single customer service issue can escalate into a widespread reputational crisis. 

Equip staff. Onboarding new employees is costly and time consuming, even without hiring challenges. In a dynamic environment where application workloads must be rapidly developed and deployed, staff and skills are crucial. Organizational learning is essential to codify automation knowledge, discard outdated practices and foster practical learning environments for skill development.

Use business outcomes, not technology requirements, to drive IT infrastructure

Start by mapping business value outcomes to various IT infrastructure delivery options to establish baseline workload placement strategies.

Design for outcomes

Assess the pros and cons of each location or node type. Prioritize impact and value through collaboration with business partners, and apply weight factors to each category. Examples include:

  • Risk. What is the risk to the organization or customer if this workload fails? What are the cascading effects on other workloads? 

  • Performance. Does this workload require high performance for queries, business intelligence, analytics and intensive research operations?

  • Regulations. Do data residency and local sovereignty laws dictate where workloads must reside? Do audit or compliance issues require workloads to remain on premises?

Apply the same business drivers to individual applications or workloads to map infrastructure nodes to workload types. By defining nodal definitions and the core architecture of each, you can establish guidelines to adapt to changing business needs. Use predefined templates for deploying new workloads wherever needed. Mapping business needs to node delivery types facilitates quick deployment of workloads across various environments.

Choose an IT infrastructure that maps to your needs

Before modernizing, thoroughly evaluate your current state, past experiences and future requirements, including your operating model. This includes assessing user satisfaction, service lead time and resilience.

Get your bearings

I&O teams often know little about the capabilities of their IT infrastructure deployment and how it evolved. Consequently, they struggle to identify their ideal IT infrastructure deployment. The goal should be to balance the agility and speed your users need with the safety and soundness of your services portfolio. Applying best practices enhances your engineering and operational profile. 

After assessing the current state and defining aspirations, a transitional strategy is necessary. This strategy should aim for the desired end state and identify factors that could either inhibit or facilitate reaching that state.

Evaluate your position on two continuums:

  • Data center vs. cloud. Data center = in-house/asset-heavy; cloud = third-party/asset-light.

  • Infrastructure services vs. platform services. Infrastructure-oriented = foundational and focused on lower-level/building block components; platform-oriented services = abstracted and focused on high-layer services.

Pin down your IT infrastructure profile

Your assessment should align you with one (two, at most) of four profiles:

  • Data-center-infrastructure-centric. Critical workloads demand local activity, low-latency requirements or stringent SLAs. Staff members must be highly skilled in managing and operating cost-effective, resilient, high-performing infrastructure and may be provided by a third party.

  • Data-center-platform-centric. This environment reflects a need to expand beyond base infrastructure to include platform services. It also involves managing critical workloads and intense staffing demands ─ including skills in cloud-native infrastructure and hybrid operations. Tight tethering and collaboration with application developers and software engineers are required, as infrastructure is key to enabling efforts.

  • Cloud-infrastructure-centric. This hybrid environment features mature processes and solid infrastructure technology extended into the public cloud environment. Staff must be equipped to support or oversee these activities.

  • Cloud-platform-centric. An organization with this environment is fully committed to a strategic cloud provider or a set of providers in a hybrid multicloud deployment. It uses the provider’s full suite of services, possibly supplemented with third-party multicloud tooling.

No one IT infrastructure profile is best, so concentrate on identifying the profile that suits your circumstances and aspirations.

IT Infrastructure FAQs

What is in an IT infrastructure?

An IT infrastructure typically includes the following components: software, hardware, network resources, facilities and security. Together, these components form the backbone of an organization's IT operations, enabling the management, deployment and accessibility of critical applications and data.


What are the key components of a successful IT infrastructure strategy?

A successful IT infrastructure strategy includes robust hardware, secure software, defined network architecture, data management, strong security measures, scalability and proactive maintenance. It supports business operations, enhances productivity and drives growth.


How can IT infrastructure drive business growth?

IT infrastructure empowers businesses to leverage technology effectively, streamline processes and respond quickly to market demands, ultimately fueling growth and success.


How can an IT infrastructure strategy be made flexible to adapt to future changes?

To create a flexible IT infrastructure strategy that can adapt to future changes, organizations should consider the following key principles and practices:

  1. Embrace cloud-native principles

  2. Utilize automation and AI

  3. Focus on modular and composable infrastructure

  4. Implement agile methodologies

  5. Employ continuous learning and adaptation

  6. Focus on risk management and governance

Drive stronger performance on your mission-critical priorities.