Some straight talk about IT infrastructure

This post is going to be about the current state of IT infrastructure.  I think it's important...I hope you'll read it and let me know if you agree.

To start, my company, Roundstone Solutions, is a VAR/reseller/partner in the IT infrastructure space, and we make our money by selling products to our customers.  We're very knowledgeable about IT infrastructure, having spent decades in the business.  We always take an objective look at things, to try and help customers and prospects make the best decisions they can.

For years, we've marveled at how customers get mesmerized by various vendors' claims about their products and then shovel millions of dollars at said vendors with hardly a look back to see if those claims ever materialized.  It's as if the job of the IT purchaser is done when the PO is signed.  No one ever really gets held accountable for their decisions, to see if the proposed benefits ever happened.  In most cases, benefits were very oversold, but the money spent still was real money.

With that in mind, my company's approach is to help educate end users so that they make decisions that will stand up to scrutiny today and in the future.  That doesn't mean things don't change and that every decision ends up to be the best over time, but at least the process and resulting decision can be analyzed and defended at a later date.

IT infrastructure decisions often come down to one of the following:

• We've always done it this way, so we'll just keep doing it this way
• Everyone says the Public Cloud is where we should put our IT infrastructure; it's what all the smart companies are doing (hardly)
• This new vendor has promised some unbelievable benefits that we just can't pass up

Sound familiar?  It ought to, because that's how most of you do it.  But is that really the smart way to do things?  No, it's not.

You owe it to yourself to do your homework UP FRONT.  It's not hard to do, and I'm going to share how to do it.

First, it's always about the workloads.  Let me say that again...the workloads are what count.  And workloads should run where they best benefit the organization, shouldn't they?  Of course they should.

You only have a few options for IT infrastructure to run those workloads.  Those options are:

1. Run the workload in your on-premises IT infrastructure (either in your own datacenter or in a co-location facility) using legacy 3-tier infrastructure
2. Run the workload in your on-premises IT infrastructure (either in your own datacenter or in a co-location facility) using Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI)
3. Run the workload in a SaaS environment (typically run by the SW vendor itself)
4. Run the workload in the Public Cloud
5. Any combination of the above options

Now, how many of your really compare the alternatives?  I'll answer that...almost none of you do.  That's crazy.  All of the options are different, with different experiences, security, backup, performance, management, and cost.  So, how do you know you've made the right decision if you haven't looked at the options objectively.  You can't, which is where the vast majority of IT infrastructure spend gets wasted.  Millions more spent that could have been re-directed into innovation.

As an IT executive myself, I urge you to be smart about how you make your IT infrastructure decisions. There's not one right answer to every situation, and you won't know which is best until you do the homework.

So, let's say you agree to the above (and you should), how do you go about "doing the homework"?

First off, you know that any evaluation by a vendor is going to end up saying that you need to buy the vendors' products.  You need to do the evaluation yourself, using your data, not the vendor's data.

And this is where my company, Roundstone Solutions, excels.  We've developed an easy to use template for evaluating the various options.  Contact me directly, and I'll be happy to share it with you.  We want you to make the right decision, by workload.  And you'll be able to defend your decision into the future.

Thanks for reading...hopefully you can tell we're a  bit different than the "typical VAR".  Reach out at 925-324-1582 or [email protected].