IT integrator opinion: Eight stages of IT maturity

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