Rationalisation of Your IT Infrastructure: A Quick Wins Guide

How to get started on your IT rationalisation strategy.

Anyone with substantial IT knowledge knows how many redundant apps and licenses exist inside any given infrastructure. These drain resources, duplicate workloads and risk becoming exponentially more expensive over time.

With Hybrid Cloud adoption now at around 80% across global businesses, it’s clear that IT leaders want to streamline their infrastructures. But adoption alone is not a fix-all. To fully utilise Hybrid Cloud, it needs to be optimised using infrastructure rationalisation.

Rationalisation allows you to systematically evaluate, optimise and organise your IT infrastructure. By automating your infrastructure with Hybrid Cloud, you can regain control of siloed systems and get more value from your investment.

Here’s a rationalisation quick wins guide to help you organise your infrastructure effectively.

Benefits of Rationalisation

The key driver of rationalisation is cost-cutting, but the knock-on effect is ever-growing. Removing duplicate apps, servers and data saves on operational costs, giving teams time to focus on more valuable tasks.

With IT teams focussing on newer tech and solutions, your organisation can keep up with market needs and ensure your clients and customers get the best possible service and products. Remote teams benefit from streamlined inter-disciplinary exchanges enabled by an organised, rationalised infrastructure.

If your rationalisation strategy involves automation, employees and businesses benefit from reduced time spent on menial tasks. That creates enriched job roles and a reduction in recruitment and onboarding.

Quick Wins: How to Get Started With Rationalisation

1. Assess Your Technical Knowledge

In 2020, Gartner’s predicted that a skills gap would be a key obstacle to Hybrid Cloud optimisation. They were, unsurprisingly, correct. Additionally,  83% of businesses list a lack of expertise as a top cloud challenge in 2022.

When IT teams don’t fully understand how the cloud works, it is unlikely they will be able to implement an effective strategy for rationalisation. Where possible, it’s ideal for teams to contain a varied range of technical knowledge.

Before engaging in any technical rationalisation activity, consider your team and their skills. You may need to engage a partner with specific expertise, such as Advent One, to equip your team with the knowledge they need to effectively optimise your cloud-based infrastructure.

2. Evaluate Current Systems and Features

The first technical step should be an audit of your current IT infrastructure. Looking at each asset in your system, consider the questions:

This evaluation will enable you to identify strengths, weaknesses and opportunities, and it is imperative for later steps. If you do not have the technical capabilities to run physical and virtual audits, a managed service provider like Advent One can assist.

3. Capture the Low-Hanging Fruit

As with any workflow, starting with the easy-to-accomplish tasks gives your team momentum. Once you have successfully rationalised simpler tasks, the larger ones will seem less complicated. Gartner recommends focusing on reducing human error on simpler tasks before attempting to innovate productivity.

Securing a few early wins also gives you ammunition for discussions with stakeholders. It’s easier to secure support and funding from the wider business when you already have a few success stories under your belt.

Exactly what can be considered a low-hanging fruit varies between businesses, but patching is a common one. If you aren’t sure where to start, choose the simplest tasks from the results of your audit in step 2.

4. Consolidate Duplicates

Consolidation is a key component of rationalisation. Where parts of your infrastructure have been duplicated, there may be data or processes doubled up. That means double the storage, double the memory and perhaps even double the workload.

Streamlining these may mean deciding one facet is effective by itself and removing the other, which will then be obsolete. Alternatively, it might mean combining data and automating or rewriting processes.

Your list of redundant systems is likely to grow as you orchestrate your infrastructure.

5. Scale, Test and Repeat

Rationalisation is not a one-time project. Constantly testing optimisation is critical for maintaining your most efficient infrastructure. You may also need to justify your decisions to stakeholders. In this case, the results of your testing can be used as leverage for funding and support.

As redundant features of your infrastructure are removed, there may also be space for remaining systems to accommodate business growth. In this case, you can scale your optimised system more cost-effectively.

Partner with the Experts: Advent One

Engaging a Hybrid Cloud automation and orchestration partner like Advent One exposes your team to expert advice across all facets of your infrastructure. We build automations internally, which allows us to quickly deploy them in our customer’s environments.

For more mature teams, we can advise on individual features – such as making the most of Ansible or training the security team on event-driven automation. It’s up to you how hands-on a partnership you want.