Every business has dreams to expand. Often, that entails expanding into new territories and markets as the business opens new offices, storefronts, or distribution centers. It’s a fun dream, but it overlooks a critical reality — the need to create an IT infrastructure that supports growth from day one.
Time and time again, businesses launch with “good enough” networking. Why? It’s cheap and easy. However, businesses that take the fast and affordable strategy find that scaling is difficult and costly. Now, their plans for growth face roadblocks. Not from opportunity, but IT scalability issues.
Consider this a cautionary business tale of underestimating the critical importance of starting with and maintaining a scalable IT infrastructure.
Planning for IT Infrastructure From Day One
A scalable, future-ready IT infrastructure thoughtfully accounts for strategy, architecture, and governance. Far more than a complex blending of routers, switches, and servers, it’s a game plan for your business’s future expansion.
Let’s explore how each factor comes into play.
Strategic Planning
If you only build for today, you’ll only last for today. An IT infrastructure should be built for tomorrow — or at least the next five years.
Like a business plan, your IT infrastructure needs to look ahead. Consider factors such as geography (local, regional, or national expansion), volume (will 100 customers become 1,000 or more), and the roles technology will serve moving forward (Is the cloud, SaaS, NaaS, or AI be part of the picture?).
Scaling Strategies?
There’s more than one way to scale an IT infrastructure across multiple locations, cities, states, and even nations. Having a plan from the start goes a long way in maximizing your IT investments. There are three popular scaling strategies to consider.
Vertical Scaling
Built with minimal machines and hardware that are very robust. It’s beneficial in the short term, but challenging to sustain in the long term.
Horizontal Scaling
Built with many machines, requiring more orchestration, automation, and integrations.
Elastic Scaling
Employs dynamic resources in the cloud. It is the most modern and flexible approach. It is also the option we recommend for most businesses.
Architecture
You’ll want to define your technology standards right away. This includes network topologies, visualization platforms, security baselines, and more. The sooner you have those defined, the less chance you have of creating a Frankenstein IT infrastructure. You know, one with misaligned OS versions and incompatible hardware.
Governance and Policy
Good governance prevents app sprawl, redundant hardware systems, and waste of IT budgets. Establish a process for IT change management, asset tracking, and IT architecture reviews to prevent issues from initiating or escalating.
The Foundations of IT Planning
Capacity Planning
While predicting is always hard, you’ll need to forecast IT usage growth, storage needs, and performance targets. Doing so upfront helps you to avoid excess capacity and technology deficiencies. If you have no idea, start thinking in triples. If one location needs X, multiply it by three to accommodate modest growth.
Redundancy and Resiliency
What keeps your business running when everything fails? Redundancy and resiliency are the most critical factors to consider for business continuity. In IT, single points of failure can bring operations to a halt for days at a time. Have a plan in place for alternate power supply, network paths, data centers, and cloud services. All of those are part of your failover strategy that should be tested regularly.
Automation and Orchestration
Simplify operations using Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools, such as Terraform and Ansible. They enable businesses to scale consistently as needed. It simplifies the process and eliminates the human errors that can occur with manual configuration.
Monitoring
Without IT infrastructure monitoring, you are always left to guess whether and how well your network is functioning. Is it at CPU capacity? Is it about to fail? Ensure you know by incorporating centralized logging, metrics, and alerts from the outset.
Security and Compliance
Are you in a regulated industry? Even if you’re not, how valuable is your data to you? Would losing it or suffering a ransomware attack cripple operations? Access controls, encryption, and compliance are a must for any IT infrastructure. Zero trust needs to be your IT mindset.
Understanding The Challenges of Scalability
Doing the right thing often comes with challenges. IT infrastructure is no different. We point these out not to dissuade you. Instead, it’s to inform you so you enter the process with eyes open and ready for what will need to happen.
The biggest challenge is always what’s already in place. Your legacy hardware and software might not have a place in the new network design. This is particularly noteworthy for companies migrating from an on-premises solution to a cloud-based network. Other factors, such as the type of Ethernet cabling or broadband connection, may also need to be adjusted.
Closely connected to legacy hardware and software is the documentation. Many times, there is none. That means your new IT partner will need to conduct a thorough assessment to understand what is currently in place and how it has been functioning before creating a scalable solution.
The last challenge is a common issue: the budget. No one loves to invest in IT upgrades, but the rewards and benefits far outweigh the cost. From our experience, no one regrets investing in better business operations — especially when scaling up is involved.
Keys To Creating a Scalable IT Infrastructure
There are four key concepts to keep in mind when planning to scale your IT infrastructure.
- Design for Failure: Assume components will fail, and recovery should be automated.
- Think Modular: Utilizing microservices and containers enables independent scaling as needed.
- Standardize: Complexity hinders scalability. Keep things simple and consistent.
- Review Annually: As your Business evolves, your IT infrastructure needs to keep pace. Yearly audits and reviews ensure ongoing alignment.
Five Warning Signs Your IT Infrastructure is Inadequate
It can be challenging to determine if your IT infrastructure is meeting your needs. That means it’s hard to see if it needs scaling or not. Look for these warning signs that indicate your IT infrastructure is stretched beyond its capabilities.
- Declining performance is indicated by slow software performance, long database queries, and high network latency numbers during peak work hours.
- Your CPU and memory utilization are consistently at 80–90% of their maximum capacity. You’ve left no room for increased workload or production peaks. In fact, sustained utilization above 75% means it’s time to scale.
- If you’re constantly struggling with storage space and find yourself adding hard drives to meet immediate demand, you’re ready to look at a more robust storage solution. Look for storage demands that increase by 20% or more a month. At that rate, you’ll max out what your current system can handle in five months.
- Watch for increasing time-out requests and 500 errors from your server.
- The number of technical support requests increases beyond normal levels and remains high.
Your business operations can only be as fast, effective, and efficient as your IT infrastructure allows. Don’t let it be the thing that holds back growth.
Ready to Future-Proof Your IT Infrastructure Scalability?
Planning for scalability is critical when future-proofing your business operations. Identifying the best way to ensure your IT can scale as needed means working with an IT expert. Matrix-NDI solves the challenges of scalability by unlocking the full ROI of your IT infrastructure. We design and install networks built for maximum speed and perfectly matched to bandwidth demands.
Why work with Matrix-NDI?
With on-staff Registered Communications Distribution Designers (RCDDs), coast-to-coast service coverage, and partnerships with leading data networking providers—including Extreme Networks, Nile, and others—Matrix-NDI delivers the expertise and reach to support your technology goals. We invite you to connect with us to see how our expertise, partnerships, and national reach can help solve your challenges.
Contact Matrix-NDI to get started. Let’s build smarter, safer, more connected spaces — together.
