Building A Dynamic Infrastucture

Key considerations

A typical infrastructure does not automatically or spontaneously become dynamic. Its natural state is static, inert, and even resistant to change. In fact, CEOs and CIOs routinely cite rigidity of infrastructure as a key constraint inhibiting achievement of critical business change and goals.

In the beginning phase of creating a dynamic infrastructure, analyzing the organization, industry, business objectives, and competitive pressures is very important followed by assessing the need for investing in initiatives that make sense for the organization. In most environments, organizations will differ in how they prioritize across the initiatives and may elect to build a dynamic infrastructure in a variety of ways.

How do you build a more dynamic infrastructure?
  • Address today’s operational challenges to free up resources for new investments: Organizations are under pressure to drive efficiencies and optimize their processes to achieve more with less. Efficiency of business and IT assets comes from integrating virtualization, energy efficiency, standardization and automation to free up operational budget for new investment. In addition, with the vast number of connected objects across the organization and the world, a dynamic infrastructure would meet the rapidly changing security and availability requirements and enable organizations to grow and succeed.
  • Converge business and IT infrastructure to work in concert, achieving breakthrough productivity and greater business value: Instrumentation of physical infrastructure resources is enabling more dynamic measurement, allocation and management to support innovation, transformation and differentiation. This transforms assets into valued services through common processes and systems that improve preventive and predictive maintenance and resource allocation to increase overall business performance.
  • Utilize alternative sourcing approaches, like cloud computing, to deliver new services with agility and speed: Companies with a dynamic infrastructure quickly realize direct business benefits from easily blending services and information across customers and third-party providers across the value chain. They can address the explosion of information and respond to business requirements while reducing capital and operational costs associated with delivery of services.
Key Initiatives

As part of its approach for building a dynamic infrastructure, IBM cites seven interrelated initiatives to evaluate and pursue, depending on current needs. IBM is uniquely qualified to help clients adopt an integrated, holistic approach to building out this strategy, since it bring years of experience in these areas to help create the right design and approach.


Figure 2. Dynamic Infrastructure Initiatives from IBM. (Source: IBM)

Service Management – Provides visibility, control and automation across all business and IT assets and operational boundaries to support delivery of cost-effective, high quality, differentiated services.

Asset Management – Maximizes the value of critical business and IT assets over their lifecycles with industry-tailored asset management solutions.

Virtualization – Reduces cost, improves IT asset utilization, and speeds provisioning of new services through leadership virtualization and consolidation solutions.

Energy Efficiency – Addresses energy, environment and sustainability challenges, and opportunities across the infrastructure.

Business Resiliency – Maintains continuous business and IT operations while proactively and rapidly adapting, managing and responding to risks and opportunities.

Security – End-to-end industry-customized governance, risk management, and compliance solutions.

Information Infrastructure – Helps businesses achieve information compliance, availability, retention, and security objectives.

These initiatives are all critically important as areas of focus. Most enterprises have invested in some of these areas. Each initiative can incrementally improve overall operations. However, improvements in one area could cause strain in another. Therefore, it is critical to look at all of it together so that improvements in one area are matched with tools and techniques to support them in another. Taking a view of each of these areas is important, but more important, is a plan to integrate them together, creating the backbone or “DNA” needed to thrive in a smarter planet. (See Figure 3.)


Figure 3. Integration of initiatives available for creating a dynamic infrastructure today. (Source: IBM)

Source: IBM
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