Typical IT Infrastructure challenges maintaining existing or building new IT Infrastructure setup are

Budgetary constraint

Reduced cost of owning IT Infrastructure is the primary goal of any business. IT cost control is further analyzed in the areas of

• Skillful assessment of existing state of IT Infrastructure 
• Analyzing  utilization of existing IT resources vs requirement and consolidating or reducing IT footprints.
• Analyzing man power resource vs requirements
• Cost control over fixed and recurring expenses.  
• Analyzing the areas of automation
• Dedicated capacity vs shared or cloud based managed virtual infrastructure
• Analyzing the areas of IT energy waste.      

Availability/Uptime

Next on the business priority is to ensure the availability of IT Infrastructure components. Ensuring the availability and continuity of the business is a challenge due to below areas of concerns

    Hardware availability

•                  Network – Ensuring each and every component of network have redundancy set and the network backbone support any failover with the least or zero impact to the Infrastructure services. 
•                  Storage – Ensuring local or SAN or NAS based storage have raid, mirroring, replication, cloning, snapshot components are configured to ensure the data integrity and availability.
•                  Server – Ensure all the components of the server are at least dual redundant, be it I/O controllers, power, Redundant ports, redundant local storage or redundant CPU to support the server availability.

Above three components ( Server, network and storage) become more challenging with Disaster Recovery solution in place due to the business uptime requirements. Datacenters are therefore certified with

• Tier I – Single non redundant distribution paths, 99.671% availability allows 28.817 hours of downtime
• Tier II – Redundant site capacity, with 99.741% availability and allows 22.688 hours of downtime.
• Tier III – Multiple distribution availability paths ( dual powered ), with 99.982% availability and allows 1.5768 hours of downtime
• Tier IV – Alongwith T3, HVAC systems are multi powered, with 99.995% availability and 26.28 min or .438 hours of unavailability.

    Software availability

OS Clustering: Operating system based cluster solutions ensure that in the event of unavailability or failure of any active node, the running services are failed over to the other good node. All host based/OS based clustering solutions are active/active. Cross site ( Geo ), clustering is setup for the Disaster recovery configuration.

Application clustering: Using application servers, web servers for active/active availability is achieved by using software based clustering solutions.

Monitoring: – All kinds of monitoring solution support the assurance of IT Infrastructure. Both software and hardware monitoring ensures required hardware and software components are monitored for faults or crossing the set threshold values.  Subsequently alerts are generated and sent to the concerned team ( Helpdesk/L2 or L3) support for further action.

Storage and network multipath: This ensures that at the OS level, both network and storage components are configured have redundancy . For network its called IP Multipathing or IP Bonding and for Storage its named as I/O Multipathing ( MPXIO ).

Backup:  As a part of data availability, routine backup should be in place to ensure the recovery of business data in case disasters. 

Consolidation 

Consolidation is already mentioned as a components drive to help reducing existing hardware footprint. Consolidation exercise should be performed with after detailed risk analysis. This also requires to ensure all business stakeholders are taken into confidence before performing any consolidation exercise. Consolidation of IT assets are classified further below

• DC site consolidation – By reducing the number of datacenters, spanned through multiple geographies, wherever possible.
• Hardware consolidation – Consolidation of hardware assets such as racks, cables, servers, storage, network components either by shutting down unused capacity or using virtualization/cloud to optimize the usage. Using pool offering than dedicated procurement allows consolidation and optimum use of IT resources.
• Software consolidation – Analyze and consolidate unused or not required software services. Using virtualization software capability to minimize the software licencing costs.

Security:

It Infrastructure security is becoming more and more crucial requirement for the business, especially in the verticals of defense, finance or healthcare. To support data security, the IT security policies should be in place. Some of the aspects of IT security are

• Unauthorized hardware and software ports accesses
• Hardware and/or software based encryption to ensure the secured data transfer.
• Regular Hardware, OS and software based patching processes
• Regular scanning for vulnerabilities and viruses
• Regular risk analysis, and security holes be patched immediately.
• Security policies adhere to ISMS based information security standards
• Adhering to required security compliance ( PCI, HIPPA, ISO27001 etc).
• Physical security policies ( like CCTV, Entry Gate passes, visitors sign, assets in and out records, different levels of security checks at Datacenter, security practices cascaded to every employee, vendors are bound to security guidelines etc ). 

Outdated /Legacy Technologies

There are two aspects to outdated or legacy technologies. First they produce risks to the existing IT and  to the business and second legacy hardware or software increase the overall cost of support, consume more power and require expert skilled resources. So both hardware and software components should be renewed to ensure the business availability and reduced cost.

Provisioning Time

This is also addressed as a part of challenge for both hardware and software builds in terms of TCO. IT Infrastructure provisioning process should be automated to ensure the quicker availability and reduced cost of man hour efforts. Cloud based infrastructure makes is more optimum to utilize the capacity of existing hardware and software components. 

Scalability

IT Infrastructure scalability been challenges till the standalone hardware was the only choice of setting up IT Infrastructure. Since the concept of shared services, first virtualization and now cloud based infrastructure services ensure the up or down scaling of infrastructure needs.

IT Energy waste:

Green IT is the need or hour and a definitely challenge for all organizations to implement, due to the cost required to support this. Although modern data centers have adopted new technologies to reduce energy footprints and using alternate sources of energy. 

Dedicated vs Shared Infrastructure 

Most of the organization still hold a good amount of standalone infrastructure resources due to multiple factor. Be it due to the business application needs, or compliance related concerns or just a typical inter business clashes to not share the infrastructure.  Although due to the business need to reduce the hardware footprint, infrastructure should be on a shared platform, unless and until there are some serious compliance concerns. 

Automaton

Automation helps reducing the man hour efforts and overall cost of supporting IT Infrastructure. Implementation of Cloud based technologies are known for automation starting from procurement to the end of life of cloud. Other areas of automation for development and operational support of the organization also helps in ensuring the availability of the business.