Taking care of your data should be one of your primary concerns as a business owner, but if you’re not qualified and experienced in IT and other tech skills, you might feel a little out of your depth managing your IT infrastructure, or even understanding what it all means.

If this is the case, there might be important things you’re overlooking and need to address soon. This article will break down some useful tips to help you expertly manage your IT infrastructure, with or without an IT team. 

Infrastructure-as-Code

A software-defined or programmable infrastructure avoids relying too heavily on physical hardware configuration and instead relies on high-level coding language. 

Implementing an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) approach will allow developers and operations teams to automatically manage data centres. While this might sound complicated, it makes managing IT infrastructure much simpler and less expensive too. With such a system in place, you’ll see increased speed and consistency, reduced costs and more efficiency in your IT management. 

Update Servers

Choosing the right servers for your business is the first step, which can be a difficult process and might require the input of someone in the know, if you don’t have a team working behind you. Business servers can be used for email hosting, file storage and sharing, data backups and more. 

Another thing to consider is to make sure you put dormant servers to rest. Unused servers can open up vulnerability to cyber-attacks and cause other problems, so it’s best to ensure that your servers are properly managed and shut down when no longer in use. 

Have a Disaster Recovery Plan in Place

One of the main roles of your IT infrastructure is to store and protect your precious data – a crucial factor to consider. But even with this infrastructure in place, things can go wrong. This is where a disaster recovery plan comes in. 

Your recovery plan needs to be in place to help you when you’re struck by the unexpected – cyber security issues, data leaks, or even natural disasters that knock data centres off their feet. This is why you need a checklist of what to handle and how. Check out this list to learn what you should be including in your disaster recovery plan checklist. 

Provide Training

Hiring someone who has studied software engineering can be an important step for your business, but it’s still a good idea to provide regular training for your IT department to help them stay up to date and learn new skills – or to take this training yourself so you have a better understanding of how these things work.

There are plenty of online and in-person training courses around the world on IT infrastructure management and similar areas that could be beneficial, and these will be well worth the investment. 

Final Thoughts

If you’re able to work with an IT team to assist you with your infrastructure management, you’re in good hands. However, if you’re handling the task yourself, you’ll see from these tips that the job is not an impossible one.

With the right tools and knowledge, you’ll be able to handle things like an expert.