How to Move Forward With IT Optimization at Your Agency

The migration from traditional IT infrastructures to commoditized hardware and open source software via IT optimization helps save costs, improve efficiency, and accelerates application delivery.

But how can you take your agency there?

In order to successfully move forward with IT optimization to accelerate innovation, your agency needs to focus on three areas: IT automation, infrastructure and storage.

Let’s take a closer look at each.

IT automation: IT automation is the use of software to create repeatable instructions and processes to replace or reduce human interaction with IT systems. 86% of IT leaders say automation is very important to cloud strategy. Automation software works within the confines of those instructions, tools, and frameworks to carry out the tasks with little to no human intervention – allowing staff to focus on mission-critical work.

Next, let’s take a look at infrastructure.

Infrastructure: Operating multiple platforms results in numerous tools and processes for configuring, updating, and patching systems, impeding management and visibility. By moving to a modern operating system, you have the flexibility to meet the demand for better services. And standardizing on a flexible, security-focused infrastructure gives you a consistent foundation for streamlining IT operations and maintenance. A single set of management tools and procedures helps you gain control over IT resources, accelerate service delivery, and improve security and compliance. One specific solution is an enterprise Linux operating system, which can also significantly reduce licensing expenses and vendor lock-in, giving you more budget and flexibility to innovate.

Finally, there’s storage.

Storage: 80% of unstructured data will be stored on software-defined storage by next year. As you optimize your IT, it will be important to establish an efficient network configuration to securely scale data storage, and integrate with any application, process, and operating model.

You will want a storage solution that stores data without the need for a metadata server, eliminating any single point of failure and allowing you to scale as you grow…

While optimizing for these three areas is critical to your modernization journey, it can also be challenging and high-cost to do that in an IT environment.

This article is an excerpt from our recent course, “Achieving IT Optimization in the Public Secor Today,” created in partnership with Red Hat and Carahsoft. In our full course, we’ll expand on IT optimization solutions that help agencies be more efficient with reducing costs and improving workflows.