Infrastructure management is sometimes divided into categories of management systems, network management and storage management. Infrastructure management products are available from many vendors, including Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Microsoft. What is infrastructure management services?
For an organization’s information technology, infrastructure management (IM) is the management of necessary operational components, such as policies, processes, equipment, data, human resources and external contacts, for overall efficiency.
Infrastructure History
The concept of infrastructure has been used throughout history to describe large and complex structures of military projects, civil projects and public utilities. This word was first used in 1875 in France to describe railway planning. However, before 1700, the so-called infrastructure began with roads and channels for transport and irrigation. The 1800s at the beginning of the 20th century included rail, telegraph, electric, water and sewage, metro and telephone communication infrastructure.
Today, the term covers ever-growing foundations, structural elements and relationships of the modern integrated business framework. The term taken from French infra means below or below. This underlines that a strong foundation is needed to support a strong organizational framework.
Infrastructure management aims to:
- Reduce duplication of effort
- Ensure compliance with standards
- Improve the flow of information throughout the entire IT system
- Promote adaptive skills necessary in a changing environment
- Ensuring interoperability between organizational and external entities
- Maintain effectiveness
- Change management principles and practices
Although all business activities depend on infrastructure, planning and projects to ensure effective management are usually underestimated to the detriment of the organization. According to IDC, a leading research company (cited in the article in DMReview), investments in infrastructure management have the largest single impact on an organization’s revenues.
Elements of IT infrastructure
The basic elements of IT infrastructure are physical systems such as hardware, mass storage, all kinds of routers / switches and the building itself, but also networks and software. In addition to these components, there is a need for “IT infrastructure security”. Security ensures the security of the network and its devices in order to maintain integrity within the overall infrastructure of the organization.
The IT infrastructure is integral with the layers of the OSI mode 1. Without the IT infrastructure, IT operations would not be possible. Everything from the end user’s physical devices to the network they work on, as well as the data they consume, is not possible without the right infrastructure in all layers of the OSI model.
In particular, the first three layers are directly involved in the IT infrastructure. The physical layer serves as the basic hardware layer. The second and third layers (data link and network) are necessary for communication with hardware devices. Without this, networking is not possible. Therefore, in a sense, the Internet alone would not be possible.
