What Reporting and Other Info Can We Provide Our Clients Related to Infrastructure Life Expectancy and Strategic Planning?
When you work with a new business partner, be it in IT or any other facet of service, you always want to have a clear idea of what the partner is doing, how they are doing it, and why.
For Acropolis, that means tracking IT assets and resources in terms of raw data and presenting all of that information to our clients at regular intervals.
In other words, we create and maintain reporting that helps you see exactly how your IT infrastructure, life expectancy, and strategic planning are going. Below, you’ll see some of the frequent reporting that we maintain to this end.
Quarterly Reviews
The first and most important report that we like to provide is the quarterly review. As the name suggests, we provide one of these every quarter. This review is packed with information, and if it was the only documentation you received in terms of strategic planning (which it isn’t), it might be enough.
This review will tell you exactly how many support tickets were created in the previous quarter. It will break those tickets into categories of support, and it will show the average response times for each ticket.
This information isn’t just showing you how well we provide IT support. The real point is that it highlights the largest spectra of users and service areas. By doing this, it’s easy to see, at a glance, where the noisiest parts of your infrastructure are. It also shows you where the most users are located and what kind of support is needed most.
Because you can see all of this at a glance, it makes it easy to ascertain the state of your tech infrastructure. If there is a struggle anywhere in that infrastructure, it will pop out in this report.
End-of-Life Estimates
Aside from quarterly reviews, we regularly produce end-of-life estimates. This is a common thing in IT where we figure out which aspects of your existing hardware and software are still well within their expected lifetimes and which ones will likely need attention soon.
We try to provide these estimates from two frames of reference: near-term and long-term.
In the near term, the estimates allow us to figure out exactly what infrastructure needs support and changes right away. If a server is having a hard time keeping up with its workload, that will appear in the near-term estimate, and we’ll make recommendations to alleviate the problem.
The long-term estimates are arguably even more important. This is where we can see beyond annual expenses and strategies. We can look a few years out and see when certain bits of hardware will be out of warranty or out of service (meaning the manufacturer will no longer provide repairs or replacement parts).
We can address a few important questions with long-term estimates. Do we see a point where we need to make decisions about IT methods and infrastructure? Are we headed toward an important crossroads? Is it time to look for alternatives? Or, are we on cruise control for the next couple of years?
Near-Term Reports
We like to provide near-term reports for more than just end-of-life expectancy. We also have near-term reports that summarize assets and usage for all of your systems.
As an example, we’ll look at the disk space available on all of your servers. If servers are getting full, that needs attention quickly, and the near-term reports will find the issue before it disrupts service.
We do the same thing with all aspects of usage. We create reports for computational resources, memory, CPU, server capacity, ISP data rates, firewall usage, and a whole lot more.
If it’s an IT resource and in use by your organization, we want to create regular reports that track that usage. We’ll use the reports ourselves to make sure we’re on top of resource demand, but we also provide these reports to your organization.
This helps with transparency. It also highlights any strategic suggestions we might make in terms of investing or pivoting IT resources. Basically, these reports are how we keep you informed as to the nuts and bolts operations of your IT infrastructure.
User and Device Management
The near-term reports are about system usage. We do the same thing to track users and devices as well.
In this case, we’re keeping track of exactly how many devices and users are in the support nexus. To keep up with these reports, we track every device added to your networks and infrastructure, and we keep a master count of how many users you have in total.
The reports help us identify overall resource allocation. The near-term reports show how the infrastructure is keeping up with demand, but the user and device management reports show us exactly what the demand is.
With these reports, you can see pretty easily where your organization will need to funnel investments. You can see areas of operation that might be shrinking and adjust how much you spend on those areas. You can also see areas of growth and what it will take to keep up with that growth.
Budgets and Spending
Lastly, we do budget and spending reviews. With this, we estimate the total cost of your existing IT resources. This estimates how much you’re spending on hardware, software, vendors, support staff, and more.
The obvious value is that it helps you understand the total cost of your IT infrastructure, and it can break that spending into common time frames. You can see monthly, quarterly, and annual costs (keeping in mind that these are estimates and specifically relegated to IT, as you will have costs that are not under our supervision).
We also create strategic planning documents that help to estimate future budgets. If you have impending projects that will require major upgrades to some of your systems, we can project some of those costs for you.
In general, we’re trying to help you track and stay ahead of IT finances in the ways that we reasonably can. These reports aren’t here to dictate spending to you. Instead, they’re just more information that helps you clearly see the bottom line when it comes to information technology.
Overall, we aim to provide clear information that makes it easy for you to see near-term and long-term aspects of your IT and infrastructure. We want to clarify immediate plans, and we want to help you build an informed roadmap that can plan well beyond the next year and long into the future.