IT integrator opinion: Eight stages of IT maturity

The point of consumption is most currently seen as the business user, but making the IT department the point of consumption is the ultimate goal.

As the international business climate becomes increasingly competitive and the labour force more dispersed, delivering IT as an accountable, automated service becomes a matter of survival.

The technologies and techniques are well practiced and proven, but few corporate IT facilities have the luxury of "starting over" - so a phased transition is prescribed.

This document is our ongoing attempt to categorise and catalogue the stages of IT maturity leading to the “holy grail” - a fully dynamic, on-demand data centre.

Let's take the business applications themselves. As software they must interact with the infrastructure (servers, networks & storage), people and other software.

Advances in virtual infrastructure (servers, networks and storage) have allowed applications to roam freely between the data centre and hosted facilities - leaving software as the service layer.

The emergence of cloud computing allows the software to interact with each other and therefore infrastructure, over the Internet. We now have the tools to transform IT into a true service.

By embracing virtualisation and automation, we can liberate the IT infrastructure - reducing costs (especially labour) and scaling capacity up & down as required.
Stage 0 - Construction
Building the business infrastructure is the goal;
* A simple server environment with direct attached storage
* Sporadic use of management tools - usually vendor supplied
* Reliance on people and process rather than automation
* Desktop and server images are created on demand

Stage 1 - Stabilisation
Achieving a stable business-class environment is the top priority;
* A simple server environment, probably with direct attached storage
* Administrators are required to actively intervene to maintain system availability
* Backups are routine and recovery is periodically reviewed
* Vendor tools are used for monitoring and management
* Network and application segmentation is enforced and managed by layered firewalls

Stage 2 - Manageability
Enhancing security and manageability of IT is important;
* A virtual network used to segment systems from each other for security & compliance
* Some virtual servers - for non-mission critical, testing or development
* VLANs are established and secured
* Content filtering is becoming important
* Standard operating environments are consolidated & mature
* Backups are automatic & recovery is manually audited
* Virtual private networks are used for remote access
* Desktop management is formally practiced using tools and techniques

Stage 3 - Consolidation
Making best use of existing servers, reducing power & maximising space is a business priority;
* A consolidated server environment using virtualisation to improve utilisation
* Infrastructure monitoring tools (availability & performance) are systematically deployed
* Major applications are centralised & managed
* Centralised provisioning is a developing best practice
* Accepted standards for documentation & process are initiated
* Standard virtual images are maintained
* Transport mechanisms are secured & optimised
* Business applications are centrally approved and formally supported

Stage 4 - Application Agility
Delivering applications with a consistent user experience is high on the agenda;
* Storage and server resources are provisioned according to business/application demand
* Server virtualisation is routinely practiced to accelerate service provisioning and consistency
* Intensive workloads are load balanced
* Shared storage is deployed for mission critical and storage intensive applications
* Application monitoring tools (availability & performance) are deployed
* Single sign-on and two-factor authentication are requirements and retrospectively fitted
* Central provisioning and delivery of desktop applications is common

Stage 5 - Business Continuity
Building a highly available stable business-class environment is the top priority.
* A high availability server farm helps applications become fault tolerant
* A storage area network (SAN) connects servers within the server farm
* Disaster recovery is procedural and disaster site synchronisation is automatic
* Data de-duplication is employed to reduce storage demands for backups
* Automated auditing of user access and application availability & performance is carried out
* Service level monitoring is practiced on business critical applications
* Email is monitored and archived
* IT assets are tracked and managed from purchase to production

Stage 6 - Business Agility
Ensuring that IT is a service and delivering computing capacity rapidly, where needed and with minimal hardware investment;
* Centralised management of IT infrastructure
* Automation is mandated from provisioning to production
* Clustered storage becomes a first class IT service
* Virtual desktops are delivered from the data centre, to thin or thick clients. Fat clients are relegated to specialist roles.
* Load balancing is used to ensure optimum performance and availability
* IT services are catalogued and delivered against internal SLAs
* ITIL best practices are routinely practiced
* Information life cycle management is practiced, email is archived using de-duplication
* Configuration management helps to avoid human error, roll backs track and reverse undesirable changes

Stage 7 - Dynamic Data centre
IT is an outcome-oriented service that is deployed and managed by policy not people that scales to meet demand;
* Network, storage, servers and security are actionable templates ? Automated workflows govern service provisioning & resource allocation
* The data centre is fully virtualised - from applications to infrastructure
* Applications and associated infrastructure can be teleported between facilities
* Offsite disaster recovery is automatic
* Computing capacity is expanded and contracted on-demand