Dos and Don'ts of IT Infrastructure

This collaboration also helps your partner structure their resources and the training and capacity of their teams according to your environment. We see a very thin grey line between partners and employees. A thing we have learned over the years is the importance of an incentives approach that avoids applying the penalties outlined in contracts unless faced with no alternative. Remunerate a company’s good work by entrusting them with more work of a different kind and agree to serve as references for them. We motivate partners and service providers to encourage innovation, proactive thinking, and transparency of opinion in their teams to resolve issues as one team and foster planning for big programs. Misconceptions about IT Infrastructure There are certain misconceptions that people have about IT infrastructure. Migration to the cloud is going to get you a lot more services and scalability while helping to reduce costs on the infrastructure side. But assuming that moving to the cloud will immediately sort out all of your problems with your applications and functionalities is a fallacy. Another misconception is considering your solitary effort enough for addressing all technological issues. The IT world today requires everybody from the cloud provider to the internal team, partners, and service vendors to understand and learn about how the current state of the IT infrastructure landscape is operating. This leads to better management of everyone’s expectations and setting of more realistic objectives. IT Infrastructure Project Achievements We redesigned a future state platform from the perspective of infrastructure, data management, and business for the union of two companies—XL and Catlin. We tested the designs, the connectivity, bandwidth, and security on all the points of contact between the different integration points. All the reconciliation of the data for investments with its night and daytime data flow between different points was completed within 12 months. Also, in the last five years, we undertook the re-transformation of a finance platform. We established a whole new data center for them, moving the legacy applications while redesigning the financial accounting processes and all the financial reporting alongside the building and bringing in new products for more global fields. We had to bring in new skills within these new technologies basically, and as a result, we achieved a lot more detailed reporting and analytics with finance resulting in more financial savings and technological efficiencies. Driving scale into our platform enabled us to integrate Catlin and XL for finance processes in under two years. Advice to CIOs Having lived and worked in the IT infrastructure space for more than 30 years, I would say that hard work coupled with extremely strong business partnerships is very profitable for the business. Partnerships can be strengthened internally by meeting on a regular, maybe weekly basis and having work allocated across technology and the business, promoting full-ownership or full responsibility for one’s work by treating each member as part of the team. I recommend understanding how your infrastructure supports your business and making that connection real for yourself and your team. The more you learn about the role an infrastructure component plays in your business, the more ownership, and accountability you will want to build into your monitoring and scalability to eventually contribute to the health of your environment. So observe, examine, and comprehend the connection between how a component is used in the business, and the significance of the effect its presence and absence has on the business. Comprehensive familiarity with the infrastructure will definitely inspire you to deploy the right skills and process controls in order to maintain the right level of balance between the risks and health of your organization’s environment.