The Business Case for Optimizing Infrastructure

Infrastructure optimization is often seen largely as an exercise in IT maintenance. But simply by setting up their company’s infrastructure effectively, leaders can ensure continuity, improve speed and open new business opportunities.

CDW recently worked on a major infrastructure project for a company that creates technology solutions for pharmacy benefit managers, pharmacies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, payers and consumers. The project started out as a greenfield Azure production environment to support prescription discount adjudication, but our team also quickly spotted opportunities to improve security, ensure disaster recovery and cut costs in other parts of the customer’s IT environment.

Here are four ways that optimizing infrastructure can not only improve IT performance but also lead to benefits that directly impact business outcomes.

Our pharmaceutical technology customer already had an established Amazon Web Services environment, but the company opted to build its new discount adjudication production environment in Azure. CDW designed production, staging and development landing zones; integrated identity; created private networking; added disaster recovery; and connected the new environment to the company’s growing multicloud ecosystem. Our goal was not to simply add another cloud environment, but to ensure that the company’s entire IT ecosystem supported this new business-critical service without introducing compatibility problems or unnecessary complexity. By optimizing infrastructure at the architectural level, our team was able to shape the IT environment around the needs of the business, rather than the other way around.

When infrastructure directly supports business-critical applications, outages aren’t mere nuisances. They have very real (and very expensive) bottom-line impacts. But uptime isn’t achieved simply by adding redundancy; organizations should also look closely at interdependencies, especially where noncritical workloads might disrupt critical capabilities. For example, we found that the initial design of our customer’s SQL environment allowed simple dashboard problems to interfere with discount processing. We fixed the issue by separating the reporting and processing workloads into different high-availability clusters.

Infrastructure often becomes more complex over time, with vendors, connections and endpoints gradually proliferating to support growth and evolving business needs. This complexity typically creates a larger attack surface, and organizations should periodically look for opportunities to consolidate potential entry points. We accomplished this for the customer by creating a centralized virtual private cloud to host the company’s Snowflake environment. We then routed traffic from both its AWS and Azure environments through that private connection. As a result, the company no longer needed separate endpoints or internet-based connections for each environment.

Often, organizations can trim costs simply by rightsizing their infrastructures. We took this approach with our customer’s SQL environment, evaluating actual storage utilization and implementing more appropriate sizing to match its needs. While rightsizing may seem like an obvious step, it is also one that’s frequently overlooked as IT departments race from one urgent matter to another. This is where a partner like CDW comes in: We not only provide a fresh set of eyes to spot inefficiencies but also give organizations the extra capacity they need to optimize their infrastructure — without pulling internal teams away from day-to-day operations.