Diving Deeper: A Comprehensive Look at Infrastructure Evaluation

1. Comprehensive Infrastructure Analysis

Before building or innovating, it’s crucial to have a firm grip on your current landscape. We look at this from many different angles.

Inventory: What are you working with?

• A deep dive into servers, databases, their versions, sizes, and utilization offer us a baseline.
• For on-prem infrastructures, our specialized Ansible role simplifies inventory collection, offering a more transparent view of the resources.
• This foundational knowledge then informs our modernization strategy, ensuring we build on your strengths and bolster your weaknesses.

Operational Efficiency: How smoothly do things run?

• Whether you use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) or a specific configuration, management dictates a lot about possible integration or transition paths.
• We engage closely with your DevOps and operations team. Their day-to-day experiences, challenges, and aspirations are crucial data points for our strategy formulation.
• If you have an Observability Stack, it becomes a treasure trove. It offers us real-time and historical data about service utilization, potential bottlenecks, and areas ripe for optimization.

Stateful Workload Review:

• This phase focuses on databases and stateful processes, shedding light on your system’s spine. This is the critical part of your system and often the most problematic.
• We examine the availability of managed services, their efficiency, and if there’s room for improvement.
• Crucially, backup protocols, system availability, upgrade paths, and maintenance routines are put under the microscope. This ensures your data remains safe and accessible, even as we innovate.

2. App Evaluation: Beyond Infrastructure

Your applications dictate your infrastructure needs, not the other way around.

Architectural Examination:

• We evaluate whether applications are on VMs, containers, or are tapping into the serverless paradigm.
• Their adherence or deviation from the 12-factor app principles gives us insights into potential scalability and manageability.
• Regular processing jobs, concurrency handling mechanisms, and other application-specific functionalities come into focus.

When the spotlight is turned to infrastructure optimization, the inherent design and structure of the applications can sometimes be overshadowed. The application architecture, in its essence, is a pivotal aspect that directly influences infrastructure decisions. A well-architected application can seamlessly adapt to infrastructure changes, harness the full potential of underlying resources, and scale efficiently. 

On the contrary, applications that aren’t optimized or designed with best practices in mind can lead to bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and inflated costs, no matter how robust the infrastructure may be. Hence, while infrastructure is undeniably crucial, it’s equally important to ensure that applications are designed and evaluated with the same thoroughness and attention to detail.

3. Security & Compliance

Beyond functionality and efficiency, safety and compliance are paramount.

In-depth Security Audit:

• We dive into your current security measures, evaluate their efficacy, and spot potential vulnerabilities.
• This involves examining data classifications, existing network security measures, access control mechanisms, and more.

Compliance and regulation:

• Whether it’s SOC2, ISO27001, HIPAA, or any other regulation, our evaluation ensures you meet the necessary standards.
• Our holistic approach means we’re not just looking at your current compliance status but also preparing you for future requirements.

4. Pain Points

A significant part of our evaluation is centered around challenges and hitches.

• Identifying pain points is something that influences the decisions and priorities we set when crafting the ideal solution.
• Businesses encounter varied challenges at distinct stages. Whether it’s issues with system reliability, performance lags, piling costs, or an inhibited capability to innovate, identifying these problems inherently turn into the motivation to address them in the design phase. It fuels our motivation to proactively address them during the design phase, ensuring a solution that’s not just reactive, but future-ready.

In Conclusion

Our detailed evaluation process is akin to a medical check-up, diagnosing areas of robust health and those requiring intervention. With this comprehensive approach, we ensure that the next-gen infrastructure we design for you isn’t just advanced, but also perfectly attuned to your business’s unique needs and aspirations. In the next chapter, join us as we unravel the subsequent steps post-evaluation, painting a clearer picture of the path to digital transformation.