At the heart of your organization lies your aptly named core infrastructure. Everything depends on it, and much of your organization’s time is spent managing it. Core infrastructure includes data center services such as virtualization and networking; client services such as client management and security; identity and security services such as access and information control; and IT processes and compliance. All of these capabilities work together to support your enterprise, and anything you can do to optimize these capabilities has widespread benefits.
By making changes in your core infrastructure’s capabilities you can eliminate unnecessary costs and complexity, improve user experience and productivity, and increase your security and control - all of which helps turn your IT organization into a strategic asset. According to an Alinean white paper, the three areas that yield the most tangible cost savings from the least amount of effort and investment are making better use of what you already own, standardizing and simplifying IT management, and reducing unnecessary costs and waste.[1]
Following are the key core infrastructure capabilities and ways to optimize them.
A key capability within your core infrastructure is data center services. The workloads included in this capability are data center management and virtualization, server security, networking, and storage. You can realize significant benefits from optimizing these areas.
With their new solution using virtualization technology, Avanade will cut servers by 85%, reduce data center costs by 40%, and improve database performance by 50%.
Virtualizing servers can:
- Increase your utilization
- Reduce your environmental footprint
- Decrease your server management costs
And now you have more choices. With cloud computing, you can use a private cloud, either on your premises or off site, to dynamically pool, allocate, and manage your resources. A private cloud significantly decreases your management costs and allows you to use resources on demand. Or you can choose to extend your private cloud to a public cloud to build, modify, and distribute applications to the web using minimal resources. This solution enables software delivery over the Internet to simplify deployment, reduce acquisition costs, and manage and consolidate your IT infrastructure.
You’re probably familiar with this scenario: internal departments regularly asking for a new application to perform a specialized task or a new device to support a mobile workforce. The business case may be sound, but the IT requirements are daunting. The more you support this trend, the less control IT will have and the greater the costs of deployment and support. But now there’s a better way. With desktop virtualization, you can provide an optimal user experience with the applications, devices, and connectivity your organization wants, yet with the security, ease of management, and lower costs that IT requires.
With desktop virtualization, we have broken the bonds between the operating system (OS), application, and data and user settings.
Desktop virtualization is an emerging trend and includes a number of solutions.
- Application Virtualization (App-V) transforms applications into centrally managed virtual services that are never installed and don’t conflict with other applications. With App-V you can:
- Stream applications on demand over the Internet or via the corporate network.
- Automate and simplify the application management lifecycle.
- Accelerate Windows 7 and application deployments by reducing the image footprint.
- Reduce end-user impacts associated with application upgrades, patching, and termination.
- Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) allows you to centrally manage desktops from the data center while providing a personalized desktop experience for end users. This solution gives users anywhere access to their personalized Windows-based desktops. It increases security and data protection while improving agility and continuity.
- Session Virtualization with Remote Desktop Services delivers session-based desktops or applications in high-density situations and works well for low-complexity or task-worker scenarios. As an added benefit, it requires less hardware and server management than VDI
- User State Virtualization isolates user data and settings from PCs and enables IT to store them centrally in the data center while also making them accessible on any PC by using Windows Roaming User Profiles, Windows Folder Redirection, and Offline Files. Using any or all of these technologies enables easily replaceable PCs for continuity, centralized backup and storage of user data and settings, end user access to their data from any PC, and simplified PC provisioning and deployment.
IT, almost by definition, faces a constant balancing act between managing risk and empowering the overall organization. When this balancing occurs within the context of both virtual and physical assets, it requires a comprehensive security strategy. Microsoft’s identity and security services focus on organizational protection for identity and digital rights management. By bringing together a secure computing platform that includes Windows Server and Hyper-V with end-to-end security and access solutions through Microsoft Forefront, you get integrated protection and simplified management of your security systems.
IT processes and compliance are a supervisory force around your technologies to ensure that systems are running smoothly and in full compliance with corporate and government regulations. To assist you with these processes, we developed the Microsoft Operations Framework, which delivers practical guidance for everyday IT practices and activities, helping you establish and implement reliable, cost-effective IT services. Microsoft Operations Framework encompasses the entire IT life cycle by integrating community-generated processes for planning, delivering, operating, and managing IT; governance, risk, and compliance activities; management reviews; and Microsoft Solutions Framework best practices.
[1] Thomas Pisello, “Simple Savvy Savings - 9 ideas to make anyone a Cost-Cutting Hero,” Alinean, Inc., December 2008