Member Article

How to Evaluate Your IT Infrastructure

Evaluating the performance of your IT infrastructure will enable you to know where it could be performing better and how.

Why Should I Evaluate My IT infrastructure?

Evaluating the performance of your IT infrastructure will enable you to know where it could be performing better and how. If it isn’t performing to its maximum potential, you won’t know how much it is costing your organisation by being under par. Your Linux infrastructure may have been state of the art when it was created, but technology is continually advancing and your business has probably changed too.

Security and Diligence

In many organisations, Linux systems were introduced piecemeal to solve tactical problems. Because it is sometimes free software, it often bypassed the scrutiny given to big budget items. As a result, some organisations over the years have acquired a patchwork of disparate Linux distributions with little or no management control of what each is doing.

LIMA

The Linux Infrastructure Maturity Assessment (LIMA) is an assessment against a maturity model. It was developed to help organisations assess the current state of their Linux environment, help define the right maturity level for them and detail how to they can achieve it.

Four Heads

The LIMA process looks at an organisation’s current Linux infrastructure from the perspective of the four major systems management principles:

Four Bodies

An assessment should look at the macro and micro level factors to provide a holistic review of the current infrastructure. This results in detailed outputs. Qualitative assessment in this field should at least cover:

• People
• Process
• Products
• Partners

Three States

An effective assessment should fully qualify your current state; identify your future level of maturity; and identify areas for improvement and change.

Takeaways

Evaluating your IT infrastructure is essential if you want to make improvements throughout your business. Remember that evaluation will help you to highlight issues with:

• Security and diligence
• The maturity of your infrastructure
• Macro and micro levels of your organisation.

Once you’ve evaluated your infrastructure, discover how to integrate a new system with the old by downloading: Integrating IT- Making the Old Work with the New. Copy and paste this link: http://bit.ly/integratedeguide

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Simon Mitchell .