Alternatively, a managed service provider (MSP) can take over the heavy lifting of optimising your infrastructure, freeing up your time and budget.
What is optimisation?
Optimisation covers many techniques that can be used to streamline your IT infrastructure. This can include reducing the physical and virtual resources used for your workloads, identifying and removing waste, and streamlining processes. The aim of optimisation is to improve the performance and cost efficiency of your IT infrastructure.
What are the benefits of optimising your IT infrastructure?
Cost savings
Many cloud environments are over-provisioned – they are allocated more resources than needed. This could include idle instances, unattached storage, or redundant architecture. As these unneeded resources are still paid for even if they aren’t used, optimising your infrastructure and ‘right-sizing’ your resources to fit your workloads will lead to cost savings.
Improved performance
It is a common misconception that optimising your infrastructure means reducing resources at the cost of performance. In reality, properly managed optimisation will actually improve performance. You can tailor your resources to the needs of specific workloads, meaning you can improve performance, avoid bottlenecks, and enhance speed and reliability.
Improved environmental impact
Resource optimisation is an effective method of controlling power consumption – the less resources you can use, the lower your consumption. Unused resources still consume power, so by removing this element of waste, you can lower the carbon footprint of your infrastructure.
Streamline your infrastructure
Many organisations suffer from ‘cloud sprawl’ – the uncontrolled growth and spread of cloud resources, services and instances. While the ability to scale up your infrastructure is a significant benefit of cloud, without the correct planning and management this can quickly get out of hand. The risks of cloud sprawl include security vulnerabilities, performance issues, spiralling costs, and operational complexities. Optimisation allows you to assess and streamline your infrastructure as a whole, preventing the issue of cloud sprawl.
What are the benefits of partnering with an MSP for optimisation?
While the benefits of optimisation are clear, the complexity of the process, and time and expertise it requires mean that it is often neglected. Partnering with an MSP brings you the benefits of optimisation, without placing the burden on your in-house teams. There are a number of ways partnering with an MSP adds value over managing optimisation in house.
Expertise and experience
Our research found that 84% of UK businesses are facing the issue of the IT and tech skills shortage, reporting high competition for talent and a lack of trained professionals (IT and Tech Skills Gap Report 2024). In this environment, your businesses may struggle to find staff with the expertise required for effective optimisation, hindering your efforts. By outsourcing your infrastructure management to an MSP, you can take advantage of their experience and specialised knowledge, without needing to hire in-house.
Free up your staff resources
Utilising an MSP for optimisation means this ongoing management task is taken away from you and your in-house teams, freeing up your time. This can increase your organisation’s productivity, as you can use this additional staff resource to invest in growth and innovation, and increase your profitability.
Proactive and continuous optimisation
Often when a business undertakes optimisation efforts, this will be a one-off process, either managed in-house or using a consultant. However, while this can be a helpful initial step, the technological landscape and your business needs change quickly. An MSP can proactively monitor your infrastructure, recommending improvements to reduce your costs and improve performance on an ongoing basis.
How can an MSP optimise your IT infrastructure?
There are several techniques an MSP can employ to optimise your infrastructure.
Right-sizing resources
By analysing your workload patterns and resource utilisation, and planning for any predicted traffic spikes, your provider can establish the actual resource needs of your infrastructure. They can then allocate resources based on your exact needs, and remove any unneeded resources.
Server consolidation
Server consolidation is a method of reducing the number of servers needed to run your workloads, without compromising performance. The process can include combining workloads to a smaller number of servers, replacing servers with higher capacity devices, or replacing some physical servers with virtual machines.
Refactoring applications
Refactoring is the process of restructuring the code of an application to improve its operation. When initially migrating a workload from on-premise to the cloud, or when optimising workloads already running on the cloud, refactoring can be used to optimise the workload to run more efficiently.
Monitoring and auditing
By monitoring and auditing your infrastructure, an MSP can identify underused resources, performance bottlenecks and wastage. Using the information these processes provide, cloud architects and engineers can then streamline your environment.
Why choose Hyve for your IT infrastructure optimisation?
Not all MSPs will offer the same level of service, so to fully optimise your infrastructure it is vital to choose the right provider.
As we offer tailored, rather than off-the-shelf solutions, we can fully customise your infrastructure to make the best use of your resources. When you initially migrate with Hyve, we undertake a full consultation, reviewing your current infrastructure, and designing an optimised platform to meet your specific needs.
We don’t stop at offering an initially optimised platform – we offer fully managed services, with our expert engineers proactively monitoring your infrastructure for inefficiencies, and implementing optimisations whenever needed. When you choose Hyve, you will be allocated a dedicated account manager, who will regularly check in with you to ensure you are getting the most from your platform.
What next?
We provide a truly consultative approach, taking the time to understand your specific optimisation needs, before planning and implementing a seamless migration. Find out more – fill out our contact form and we will be in touch.
