Enabling your IT infrastructure: The bedrock of business transformation
Organizations rely on technology to remain competitive, deliver a winning customer experience, improve the employee experience and prepare for the future. With technology changing how you do business, now’s the time to ensure your IT infrastructure can support your overall business goals.
Here are six key ways to unlock the full potential of your IT infrastructure so you can optimize your business transformation.
Rightsizing IT infrastructure for your business needs
Enhancing reliability to safeguard operations
Delivering a better customer experience
Enhancing reliability to safeguard operations
Attracting, retaining and upskilling IT employees
Protecting business data and systems
Preparing for the artificial intelligence (AI) future
Is your IT infrastructure ready?
You need to have the right IT infrastructure in place to meet the needs of your business today and to support your future business objectives and goals.
When considering your approach to IT infrastructure modernization, it’s not just a matter of throwing more computing resources at the problem. While that might help you make the most of the applications you use today, your long-term vision could require a switch to the cloud, the migration of a critical database, an upgrade to a more modern application or any number of other solutions.
By aligning your IT infrastructure with your business requirements and objectives, you can incorporate an effective solution that ensures your OPEX and CAPEX is spent efficiently and effectively. Experienced professionals can help you determine where to take your IT infrastructure from here. For example, while the cloud may be all the rage, if your business is focused on serving the nine-to-five needs of a local region, you may not need 24/7 availability or have the need to hyperscale. In this case, it may be more effective and efficient to modernize your on-premises infrastructure.
Technology can’t power business transformation if the applications go offline. As a result, a core focus of your IT infrastructure should be reliability. By taking the time to understand the current state of your IT infrastructure—including the network, servers, storage, public and private clouds, endpoints, backups, ITSM and collaboration tools—you can then make the changes required for high availability and necessary redundancy.
Knowledgeable professionals can help you identify the investments you need to make in your IT infrastructure to yield the most benefits. Whether you’d like to improve security, leverage cloud solutions, incorporate automation or take on other initiatives, guidance from a trusted advisor can help you enhance your operational availability and avoid disruption.
Many organizations struggle to deliver a winning digital customer experience due to outdated technology that’s expensive to upgrade. However, legacy systems often lead to inadequate speed, limited accessibility, greater security risks and less reliability.
The longer you make do with obsolete processes and applications that impact the customer experience, the harder it will be to retain existing customers or attract new ones. As a result, every IT infrastructure modernization initiative should also be considered a customer experience (CX) initiative. Modernizing your IT infrastructure can allow you to deliver a consistent and seamless CX across multiple channels, using customer data to personalize engagements and deliver innovative new solutions that help foster customer loyalty.
Finding reliable and well-trained IT talent is always hard. It becomes even harder to attract top talent when you’re leveraging legacy IT systems. As technology evolves, so do the skillsets of IT professionals, and their desire to work with the latest technology will make it hard for your business to retain top talent.
To remain competitive, you need to modernize your IT infrastructure to leverage cutting-edge technologies. At the same time, it’s important to understand which legacy processes or systems can’t be modernized and then have a plan in place to address those gaps. Experienced managed IT professionals can provide the insight and manpower to upgrade your IT operations, train staff and manage legacy systems so in-house IT staff can focus on more innovative and valuable projects. The more your staff can digitize your IT infrastructure, the more efficient and productive they’ll become, which can help maximize the ROI of your IT efforts.
Cybersecurity isn’t just about protecting your data. It’s about protecting your operations, your customers and your reputation. An outdated IT infrastructure can make it difficult to understand your attack surface or adequately gauge your cybersecurity maturity, leaving you at risk of attack.
Reactively responding to an attack can be costly. Instead, a proactive approach seeks out issues and leverages modern solutions to secure access and protect data. Well-trained support can help you assess your data and processes so you can understand how they’re being protected and what your current risk exposure looks like. Professionals can then help you select the appropriate security solutions required to reduce risk, such as identity and access management, vulnerability management, security monitoring, incident response, and employee security training.
While generative AI (gen AI) is in the news, it’s likely not embedded in your IT infrastructure—yet. However, it won’t be long before many systems and applications leverage gen AI in all its forms to help your business leverage new insights.
The time to prepare is now. Gen AI can require high-performance, specialized hardware to work efficiently, and you’ll need a large-scale, efficient data infrastructure to feed AI models. Skilled support can assess your needs and develop a proactive plan to ensure you have the right protections and scalability in place to respond to changing market demands. Policies and procedures can keep employees from using data improperly or prevent AI models from delivering biased, untrue or otherwise compromised results. You’ll also want to ensure your IT infrastructure has the bandwidth for all this extra data so that gen AI processing doesn’t affect your real-time applications like VoIP or video conferencing.
You need a strong IT infrastructure foundation to support your organizational vision. RSM advisors deliver solutions that enable you to identify, build and manage the next generation of infrastructure systems, safeguard your business and meet the unique regulatory compliance requirements of your industry.
Ready to identify your current-state gaps, risks and opportunities? RSM’s Information Technology Assessment can help guide your IT investments and meet your business objectives.
Learn more about the IT Assessment
Contact our infrastructure team
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