6 Ways How IT Infrastructure Management can Enable Business Growth

Robust and agile IT infrastructure management can improve your business’s productivity, customer satisfaction, and future growth in numerous ways. Today’s fluid, scalable, flexible, and ever-changing IT techniques are nothing like what the pre-digital era used. In this era, digital transformation presents businesses with an opportunity to scale.

Despite that, businesses still face challenges when their IT infrastructure is outdated and they lack proper investment to implement and manage modern infrastructure. Proper  IT infrastructure management can change the bottom-line of business drastically.

Businesses with the capabilities to handle infrastructure management and employing modern techniques like cloud computing, RIM, hyper-converged infrastructure among others and make the most out of the opportunities these technologies offer will scale high and see their productivity improve.

How IT Infrasture Management Can Improve Your Business

When you optimize your IT infrastructure and implement modern management, your business can grow and improve in numerous ways including:

1. Increasing Customer Acquisition and Retention

The provision of quality and consistent services is essential to attracting new customers and retaining existing ones. IT infrastructure management allows you to ensure services and communication with the customer are not interrupted by downtime and delayed delivery.

The surest way to acquire new customers is by delivering unique services with consistent and excellent performance and without degradation. Proper management of IT infrastructure ensures that all hardware and software are optimized and working perfectly for service delivery.

2. Enabling Both Small and Large Expansions

Satisfied customers tend to come back for more. The better the services the more you have the chances of growing customer loyalty. You can then plan on opening more branches in different locations to cater to the growing volume of customers.

Whether you’re increasing your line of production, opening other branches, or acquiring another business, IT infrastructure management plays an important role in making sure both the physical and virtual infrastructure is intact and in optimal working condition during and after the process.

3. Improving Marketing 

Modern IT infrastructure management enables you to upgrade infrastructure and adopt new technologies as they come thereby giving you more time to improve your marketing strategies and conduct research and development to improve your products and/or services.

The ability to deploy new infrastructure and manage it simply and easily will reflect in the business’s improvement marked by reduced deployment time after pre and post-tests. This in turn helps the business to scale as most of the personnel’s time is spent on improving other areas in the business.

4. Efficient Maintenance Schedule

Good IT infrastructure management allows you to spot and plan for any necessary maintenance when it will be of less impact on the business. Identifying usage patterns and peak times will give you insight on when it is best to schedule maintenance. This means that you will provide better services with a well-maintained infrastructure.

5. Increase Uptime

Downtime can be very expensive for your business and unless you employ proper IT infrastructure management, you will even lose potential customers.

State-of-the-art management will easily detect changes in the network and work fast before disruptions occur. Otherwise, they’ll leave potentially dire effects that you’ll take time to recover from. 

For a business to grow, your systems and networks are supposed to be up and running every time. But since downtime is bound to occur, detecting the disruptions and acting on them early enough is what will prevent you from being stagnant.

6. Streamline Application Performance

Applications are part of IT infrastructure essential for a business to scale. If their performance is poor, they can slow down traffic, impact customer experience negatively, diminish user experience, and consequently, affect overall growth.

Therefore, you need dependable iT infrastructure management to monitor application performance and detect where there are problems then work to resolve them. This will improve customer experience and satisfaction.

How to Generate More Value From IT Infrastructure

Even with optimized infrastructure and proper management, you’ll still need to know how you can use the infrastructure to generate more value for your business. Otherwise, there’s no use of employing expensive infrastructure which is under-utilized.

Here are some ways you can use to make sure you get the most out of your IT infrastructure.

Prioritize Your Investment

In this digital era, most businesses worldwide are seeing the need to switch to digital to keep up with the changes. However, putting all your investment into digital technology won’t equate to earning revenue. There are other parts of the business that require investment too.

Therefore, your IT investment strategy needs to align with your company’s goals. You will need to identify where there are technology gaps and what should be prioritized. Identify where to put more investment and where to reduce or reallocate the expenditure to meet your financial needs and support growth.

Protect It

The cyber threat is one of the greatest challenges businesses are facing. From state-sponsored attacks to insider leaks, businesses are living in constant fear. It is every business owner’s nightmare to wake up one day and find all their systems down or infected with malware.

 Unfortunately, most businesses are prioritizing going for the latest technology instead of protecting whatever they have, first. The best way is to stop focusing on perimeter security around your infrastructure but embed it into the core of your network.

This way, you can focus more on business strategies and ideas and get real-time data and management without the constant fear of cyber threats.

Look to the Cloud

The traditional on-premise infrastructure method has its disadvantages. Apart from requiring extra space and servers as the business grows, it’s also hard to manage. Businesses are now opting for cloud computing which is less costly and easier to make changes.

Some are even going for hybrid cloud computing which is a mixed on-premise infrastructure and cloud computing. It has the advantage of being able to switch between the two worlds depending on the application being used.

Conclusion

No matter how modern or optimized your IT infrastructure is, without proper IT infrastructure management, you may not see the value of it. Proper management, on the other hand, will see your business reap a ton of benefits. You will also need to know how you can make the most out of your properly managed IT infrastructure.