How to audit your critical IT infrastructure

Do you ever hear the following complaints from managers and executives in your enterprise?

• “Our issues are being caused by slow performance.”
• “Can we get more out of the IT assets we own?”
• “How can our technology help us execute data-driven decisions in a faster way?”

If you’re an IT manager, chances are you’ve heard these comments and requests before, but you’re spending the bulk of your time keeping all systems up and running. With continuous upgrades and equipment additions, not to mention lingering legacy components in your IT environments, it can be challenging to keep track of what you have and how it’s working. This is where a critical infrastructure audit can be helpful for IT teams. By taking a step back from the minutiae of daily monitoring and taking the pulse of your holistic systems, IT teams can benchmark their systems and use the information gained to plan upgrades and improvements. In order to do this, a critical audit has to be easy to implement, not affect system performance and stay in the background.

A critical infrastructure audit can either disprove these claims or identify why these situations are occurring and offer suggestions for improvement. Critical infrastructure audits can run concurrently with your day-to-day operations, and at the end of the one- to two-week monitoring period, IT teams have a clear idea of the state of their systems. Perhaps, as the IT manager, you think your system performs relatively well. An audit may reveal that in actuality, you’re only getting a portion of the performance you should be seeing with the system you have in place. These analytics can help you discover where there may be performance issues and mitigate the problems without spending more money to increase performance capacity.

Infrastructure audits are particularly important if you are in a dynamic, heterogeneous environment where the infrastructure is experiencing frequent changes that increase the complexity of the system. A lack of visibility may be making it impossible to gauge utilization, performance or the health of your infrastructure. While your team may not be ready to invest in a long-term performance monitoring and management platform, conducting a critical infrastructure audit can provide valuable information to your teams and allow them to keep your performance and utilization at optimal levels.

If you’re considering a critical infrastructure audit on your IT systems, read our fact sheet for more information.