How to prove investments into IT before top management TADetails

As an example we will consider the project in one of the largest Russian agroholdings which faced problems in support and development of the IT environment because of the heterogeneity connected with rapid expansive growth.

Audit of IT infrastructure will help to estimate volumes of potential investment

When audit of IT infrastructure can be required

The IT landscape of the customer was very various because of the business development strategy: the input to new regions was performed through purchase of the companies of the same profile of work. At the same time, the new companies had an own idea of how information technologies should work for the business benefit. The new websites and systems occasionally were added uncontrolledly. IT infrastructure became bulky — there were difficulties in management and support.

The customer wanted to create an integral picture about the existing IT landscape and to receive "road map" on unification of network infrastructure to reduce costs for its support.

How to prove the budget on IT optimization

The IT service of the company which had plans for optimization of IT systems acted as the final customer. However, top management was not ready to invest those means which were requested by own specialists. To prove the budget the decision to use external examination was made.

The tender for audit of IT infrastructure which winner was one of the leading IT and outsourcing companies — ICL Services was as a result announced. She booked audit of systems, revealed bottlenecks and helped IT service of the company to defend the investment project on transformation and optimization of the IT environment.

What includes audit

In the considered project several key tasks of audit were defined:

• identification of problems and "bottlenecks" in IT infrastructure;
• development of the strategy of development for a corporate data network with the horizon not less than three years and plans for increase in amounts of business from 30 to 60% a year;
• recommendations about equipment procurement;
• determination of a limit of a resource of the installed equipment and development of lifecycle of IT systems;
• examination of the projects on transformation offered by the customer's IT department.

What is the time can occupy inspection

The Corporate Data Networks (CDN) of the customer of a predstavyala the complex system covering four regions in Central Federal District of Russia and also Primorsky Krai. Except the analysis of KSPD in these regions, in head office there took place audit of applied IT systems.

Inspection by forces of two system architects of ICL Services took two weeks: experts analyzed work more than 200 items of equipment, held several tens of interviews with personnel of the customer of different level: from ordinary engineers to heads of IT service.

And here preparation of the closing statement demanded the whole month and connection of ten specialists of the different directions for comprehensive examination of collected data.

What as a result of audit will be received by the customer

The customer was going to increase quantity of remote locations by 30-60% a year. Therefore it was important to it to understand as far as IT infrastructure is capable to satisfy requests of the growing business and to provide the continuity of business processes.

During audit bottlenecks in the current implementation of systems were recorded:

• lack of uniform standards in regions of presence;
• badly managed park of the equipment;
• lack of control of version control;
• problems with routing and cyber security.

At the same time, for so distributed IT environment, fault tolerance and predictability of recovery time after failures — some of the most important parameters.

Audit helped the customer to estimate volumes of potential investment and to make the IT system easily scalable. Specialists of ICL Services carried out independent examination of projects of IT service of the customer and optimized them. From practices the full-fledged business case — with specific stages, actions and calculation of investments turned out.

When implementing the concept the customer will increase availability of the IT service due to reduction of number of emergency situations and time for recovery of service and also will reduce the cost of ownership of IT infrastructure.