Simplicity in Both Infrastructure and Applications: Part 1

March 16, 2021

By John Duffy, CPP Chief Technologist

For those of us in the IT space, whether we are in infrastructure or applications, we desire “simple solutions that work.”  In this blog, I will focus today on the infrastructure perspective of that story.

We used to have on prem infrastructure solutions that we thought were complex, especially when trying to choose from among three to five different vendors and integrate components into a whole.  “AWS cloud solutions” were supposed to be cheaper and simpler.  We were willing to learn a whole new approach provided it would be cheaper and less expensive.  Then we found out that AWS was not really simple and actually cost more. It was just different. Then rental competitors arose. Choosing between multi-vendor physical infrastructure and multi-vendor rented and totally virtualized infrastructure became really complex. And we found out that we really did want some of our key corporate assets in our own infrastructure.

Now we had some data on owned equipment, and some in rented equipment.  We tried to simplify and wound up with something even more complicated.

We also found out that we want to manage “all our infrastructure” (whether owned or rented), “all our data,” and “all our applications” the same way.

How do we do that? Can we do that?

Right now, the answer is “not well at present,” but our industry is moving in the right direction to simplified infrastructure, simplified inventory, simplified management and create universal policies.

We want to build infrastructure with the same architecture no matter where that infrastructure resides. We want one tool that sees and inventories ALL of our infrastructure.  Data and applications are not all equal.  We want to be able to “right size” performance and capacity to fit the differing needs of data and apps, manage by policy, and adjust to fit current needs.  We want to secure all our data against bad actors and acts of nature. And we want to manage all of it from anywhere, 7x24x365.

Whereby “rented” and “on prem” used to be mortal enemies of each other, now we want them to play nicely with each other. (We really do not care where the infrastructure is).  We want to know that all of our corporate intellectual property is protected.

Different companies are trying different methods of developing a simplified way of managing all a company’s IT infrastructure the same way.  But before I get into those differing infrastructure approaches, my next blog will take a little detour into application development and management.

Because app dev and infrastructure management have to work together for our goal to be realized. Stay tuned…