Business requirements and technology are both essential elements in determining the strategic plan for an organization's infrastructure. Having a solid strategic plan helps organizations in maximizing the benefits that they derive from their infrastructure capital expenditures. Public cloud systems have fundamentally altered the way strategic planning needs to be done. With public cloud systems, instead of analyzing capital investment needs, one needs to think of operating expenses. With public cloud systems, the business benefits from not being constrained by pre-determined infrastructure. Additional infrastructure, as required, is typically available instantly.
Public cloud systems do not make inrastructure strategic planning unnecessary. Many businesses hope for predictable revenues and predictable costs, so that the money required to run the business can be sourced and profits can be reinvested methodically. Therefore, it is essential to analyze and forecast the infrastructure needs in public cloud. Such a forecast should obviously include room for scaling up systems when needed. Since scaling up systems entails an increase in operating expenses, there is a need to monitor the costs of usage of public cloud systems. Another major benefit of using public cloud systems is that the one can minimize the presence of unused infrastructure, by relinquishing such resources when they are not required. This is not possible in traditional data center based infrastructure where one cannot do much about idle infrastructure. However, the capability to relinquish unused infrastructure in public cloud systems requires infrastructure monitoring, business analysis and developing processes to do so.
Traditional data center based infrastructure is a long term capital investment, with most equipment having a life span of 3 to 10 years. Strategic planning is necessary to ensure that the infrastructure meets the current and the future business needs, considering the rapidly changing technology environment. So, there are two things that drive this strategic planning: (1) business needs of the organization and (2) technological changes.
It is interesting to note that even of the business needs of the organization remain constant (which they don�t most of the time), obsolescence and technological changes require planning for infrastructure replacements, additions or subtractions. For example, newer technology may make it cheaper to purchase and maintain a newer server than retain an older server. Technologies like virtualization enable multiple applications running on different operating systems to make use of the same server, especially when the server is has a newer, faster central processing unit, larger memory and higher network and storage bandwidth. Such newer servers can be used to consolidate and replace two or more older servers. When the maintenance costs of these older servers are greater than the purchase cost of the newer server, it becomes financially and operationally expedient to take this approach.
Read more at: Strategic Planning for Infrastructure