By Sushant Purushan, Chief Revenue Officer, India Business Region, 3i Infotech
Why is it that some brands and organizations seem to consistently provide their customers with a superior user experience, you may ask? While customers don’t know or care to know what is happening in the backend, it is always the UX at the front end that matters the most to them. To make this a reality, it’s the ‘Infrastructure’ at the backend which is enabling them to have such an experience.
According to IDC, India’s spending on digital technologies is expected to reach $69 billion by 2025 and would constitute almost 70% of the enterprise IT spending happening in India. Supporting this ambition is the digital Infrastructure, which sits at the core of it. Hence, let’s delve a little bit into understanding it.
Need for a stable and healthy Infrastructure
IT infrastructure is the foundation that allows companies to seamlessly operate. It enables businesses to build exceptional experiences that leverage new technologies for consumers and employees internally. A stable and ‘healthy Infrastructure’ is an Infrastructure that caters to applications and does not have downtime or end-experience hurdles. For instance, as end-user, we transfer money through RTGS / NEFT, but these applications need good Infrastructure that’s available 24X7 for the transaction to go through without hindrance.
Investing in the right Infrastructure, whether it’s On-prem or Cloud
In today’s world, technology Infrastructure can be on-premises or on the cloud, but without technology, no sector or company can fathom moving ahead. In Infrastructure, we often notice that ‘capacity’ tends to become a problem area. For instance, when an organization starts to grow and scale, say by 2X or 3X, the need to continually monitor the health of the Infrastructure to ensure it’s up and running becomes very important. With the Infrastructure remaining the same, we might encounter response issues to the application hosted on the devices. End-user desktops & laptops are also part of the Infrastructure, and this also must have the right processor and capacity basis the application requirement.
Need for Redundancy in Infrastructure
For all critical applications, it’s also important to have redundancy in place, predominantly seen across BFSI and the telecom sector. Organizations can ill afford to have even a minute of downtime, for which building High Availability, Disaster Recovery, and Business Continuity plans become vital, not discounting the core applications required in manufacturing, the health sector, or other domains. Secondly, choosing the appropriate orchestration and virtualization layer which should help move the application on the fly during downtime and at the same time not compromise on security and compliance is important. Flexibility and agility help keep the applications running all the time.
Evolution of Infrastructure monitoring from Reactive to Proactive to now Predictive
The fast-moving world wants everything within seconds and minutes. Having one’s mobile network, internet or mobile banking down is a huge inconvenience for everyone, as these have become almost basic needs. In earlier days there used to be reactive support and people used to do eyeball monitoring all the time to check for any hindrances. However, technology has become so vital that support has moved from Reactive to Proactive monitoring and today the expectation is towards Predictive monitoring. For instance, an alert now needs to come from the system if the hard disk or processor is likely to be down in the next 48 hours so that the replacement part is made available / fixed before it goes down.
Adoption of automation
Predictive monitoring becomes more effective with the integration of automation tools. Eventually, software and tools are more effective than human observations as they have been configured for quick decision-making and actions basis the workflows. Automation Platform provides an enterprise framework for building and operating IT automation at scale, from Hybrid cloud to the Edge. Automation isn’t just a tool—it’s a strategic imperative. AIOps help in helping better decision-making and faster, proactive performance monitoring and decrease the MTTR.
To sum it up, every industry now is driven by technology, and the backbone of any technology is its IT Infrastructure. Hence, investing in a high-quality infrastructure will provide higher efficiency, increased safety, decreased environmental impact, and more effective delivery of end applications and services.