The Importance of Infrastructure

You may have something in common with my younger grandkids. Not just the total lack of respect for me – but a love of infrastructure! My youngest three, oh boy, they love playing with infrastructure!

This is their latest infrastructure project in the basement of our house.

What, you thought it was going to be a network or something? They’re like 3 to 7 years old! But it does follow the traditional definition of infrastructure. Facilities, processes, things that allow organizations or societies to work together.

Now, historically, that’s been “roads, buildings, libraries,” that kind of stuff. But today from an IT standpoint, it means more devices, and the methods or conduits under which information or data can be transmitted. So when we talk at an I.T. level, we talk about our internet connections, switches, routers, firewalls, wireless access points, cabling all that kind of fun stuff. All of that is IT infrastructure.

Now cutting management, maintenance, & improvements for infrastructure is the easiest thing to do for an organization looking to cut costs. But in a lot of cases, the degradation of the infrastructure could literally take years. So, you save money today but you don’t see the impact or the penalty for it until way down the road. (This isn’t the case when it comes to managing the security infrastructure. That’s a different topic. )

So, one of the things what we need to make sure we do is that we treat managing, maintaining or improving infrastructure with the attention it deserves, otherwise we’re just penalizing ourselves down the road. And usually at a much higher cost.

Now if this sounds political, I suppose to a certain degree it is. We’ve been talking as a country about upgrading infrastructure for literally decades. Neither party has been coming up with the kahunas to actually do it.

The same is true for organizations and companies that find themselves woefully behind on managing infrastructure.

So, how’s your Infrastructure? How’s your IT Infrastructure? And the grandkids? How you doin’?