The infrastructure questions that need asking early

One of the big benefits of the outsourced, cloud -based infrastructure model is speed.

There are several facets to this; performance clearly being among the most important.

Another is speed of provisioning, which remains a major selling point for cloud, given that IT buyers can spin up new resources according to need and in near real time.

Take a manager responsible for buying infrastructure for a large enterprise, for example.

When considering various providers, the criteria they apply might typically address factors such as price, compute capacity, storage, bandwidth, and geographic location.

This is very helpful for narrowing down the choice, but it doesn’t show how easily the organization can deploy and operate the chosen environment.

At the same time, infrastructure procurement processes have become so quick and convenient that they are almost as frictionless as buying something from Amazon, and that’s where problems can start.

Although it can feel like it, infrastructure is not a one-off, fire-and-forget choice; the operational impact persists throughout its lifecycle in production environments.

A decision that appears straightforward at the start can quite easily become more consequential or expensive once migration or day-to-day management begins.

For example, migration might require more internal effort than initially expected, or the organization may discover it lacks some or all of the skills or support capabilities to manage the environment as intended.

So, how can these issues be addressed? It is important to plan for the possibility that migration may require more engineering time and coordination than expected.

Many IT teams will be familiar with the need to reconfigure existing applications or data before they can run in the new environment, among other common scenarios.

Taking it one step further, when a new or upgraded service is more successful than anticipated, costs can easily grow with usage levels and capacity.

Addressing this issue may require additional scaling, which can itself introduce additional management or security complexity.