- INTRODUCTION AND PROBLEM DESCRIPTION
- SOURCES OF IT INFRASTRUCTURE PROBLEMS
- HOW WE CAN HELP FOR EACH REASON
- WHEN WE CANNOT HELP
- ECOSYSTEM54 AS A PLATFORM FOR YOUR PROJECT'S FUTURE GROWTH
INTRODUCTION AND PROBLEM DESCRIPTION
IT infrastructure is a crucial part of businesses. However, despite the importance of IT infrastructure, many companies face serious problems that adversely affect their business processes and development.
In this article, we would like to gather all the important points from our experience that we have encountered over the past few years.
- The marketing budget is being inefficiently utilized due to infrastructure problems or issues with its components.
- Difficulties arise in rapidly growing the business and adding functionality when implementing a new business idea.
- Changes that need to be made to the IT infrastructure become a headache, lasting for months or even years.
SOURCES OF IT INFRASTRUCTURE PROBLEMS
We will discuss the most common reasons that can lead to issues with your IT infrastructure.
POOR PLANNING
All projects start with planning. Critical mistakes made during the planning phase can have a significant impact on the project as a whole. Incorrect requirement definition, wrong technology stack selection, underestimation of costs and resources can lead to future problems.
One mistake is the company's desire to keep all processes in-house, including non-core parts of the business. In simple terms, if a company is engaged in trading or providing specific services, developing an internal IT infrastructure can significantly slow down the core business and take 5 to 10 years. This requires significant time and financial investment, and ultimately, the company may turn into an IT company, moving away from its core activities.
BUSINESS SCALING (BUSINESS GROWTH, NO CONTRACTOR)
Initially, when a business is just starting out, the main goal is often to get up and running. Its scale is relatively small, and the choice of an IT system like Drupal, WordPress, or Django seems sufficient for fulfilling tasks and launching the business.
However, as the business grows and new challenges arise, you may encounter problems. Your current system lacks the necessary flexibility and stability to handle emerging tasks and support dynamic growth.
Business scaling is also related to choosing a contractor. Based on the initial requirements and constraints, you may have hired a contractor specializing in simple technologies. However, as the business expands, there is a need to transition to other technologies or scale the system, and your current contractor may not have the capability to make such changes. Perhaps they lack the necessary competence and experience in planning and developing scalable systems.
Therefore, scaling the business requires transitioning to a more flexible and scalable IT system and choosing a contractor who can accommodate these changes and develop a system that meets the new requirements and volumes of your business.
WRONG TECHNOLOGY STACK CHOICE
This point is closely related to the planning phase and is derived from it.
You may find that due to poor planning, technologies have been chosen that are too basic and cannot meet the requirements for solving current problems and emerging needs.
Another common mistake is choosing the wrong technologies for the current project requirements. For example, using .NET for data analysis may be a bad decision because the technology may not provide the required efficiency and functionality.
You can also encounter the “overkill” problem when a technology is chosen that is redundant for the size of the company or the required tasks. For example, using Java for a small company may not be justified, since Java's effectiveness is evident when working with large teams of developers (10 or more people).
Another poor technology stack choice may be to use a very niche technology such as Ruby on Rails. Although Ruby on Rails provides virtually identical functionality to PHP, finding a Ruby on Rails developer can be difficult.
Overall, choosing the wrong technology stack can lead to unproductivity, low efficiency, difficulty scaling the project, and problems hiring qualified developers. Therefore, it is important to carefully analyze project requirements and make informed decisions when choosing a technology stack.
IGNORING THE PROBLEM OF TECHNICAL DEBT
Businesses often do not pay enough attention to the accumulation of technical debt during the development and support process. However, technical debt has serious consequences.
The main point about technical debt is that constantly running a system in a "go, go, go, go, go, go" mode can lead to an accumulation of problems and flaws in the system's code, architecture, and infrastructure. This may cause the system to experience spontaneous collapse at some point, which may affect the functionality of the entire system or its individual components.
Technical debt includes various types of problems such as poorly organized code, lack of automated tests, outdated technology, poor architecture, and other technical deficiencies. The accumulation of these problems over time can significantly complicate the development of new features, increase the time required to fix bugs, and increase system support costs.
HOW CAN WE HELP FOR EACH REASON
Our company has extensive experience in solving IT infrastructure problems that our clients face.
Improper planning
If there are business requirements, we can help plan the most appropriate approaches for the IT infrastructure. We can also provide advice so that the customer can think about and weigh the pros and cons, as well as correct possible planning errors.
Change in business scale
When a business grows but the contractor cannot keep up with its needs, this can become a serious problem. We are ready to replace the current contractor and take responsibility for the successful completion of the project.
Our approach is based on an audit of the contractor's activities. As a result of the audit, we will provide information about the project and its current status. As a rule, the audit ends with the transfer of the project, but we do not take on every project.
We evaluate the business's capabilities and willingness to change, as well as the scale of change, since our goal is to maintain the operating state of the business and ensure its normal functioning as a whole. We act as a technology partner that integrates into our clients' processes.
Selecting the wrong technology stack
We offer our business development expertise to help you select the optimal technology stack for a fairly long period of time, from 3 to 5 years, and sometimes up to 10 years. We also focus on operating modes to ensure your business can operate successfully in a variety of environments. We can choose a technology stack with these challenges in mind, as some technology solutions require too much attention just to support. We can work with these points and select the appropriate technology stack.
Ignoring the problem of technical debt
If a technical debt problem has been ignored for a long period of time, we can conduct a technical audit and provide solutions. We can also develop a plan to gradually reduce technical debt to reduce overall risk to the business.
WHEN WE CAN'T HELP
We have a lot of experience, but there are circumstances with which we cannot help you:
- We have a narrow tech stack that includes Python for backend development and React.js for frontend. We also have experience creating native mobile applications and PWAs. However, our specialization is limited to these technologies, and we cannot develop projects beyond our technical stack;
- We fundamentally do not work with the Windows stack. This is due to the fact that insufficiently specialized solutions are obtained based on the Windows stack. They are unreliable, unstable and often require a high level of maintenance. Also, such systems have low potential for automation.
In other cases, if you have a clear idea of your business plan and requirements, a clear understanding of what you want, we are ready to help you at all stages of the project, including checking the compliance of your desires and capabilities, assessing risks and security requirements.
ECOSYSTEM54 AS A PLATFORM FOR FURTHER GROWTH OF YOUR PROJECT
One of the outstanding technologies developed by 54origins is the Ecosystem54 microservices framework. This is a set of open source technologies for software development based on microservice architecture.
Benefits of using Ecosystem54:
- service independence: each service can be developed and launched independently of others, which speeds up the development process and increases productivity;
- high level of security: Ecosystem54 uses best practices in the field of security to ensure protection against any possible threats;
- scalability: thanks to the microservice architecture, each service can be scaled individually, allowing companies to meet growing needs without sacrificing performance or security;
- reasonable price: We strive to make our technology accessible to all companies, which is why we offer reasonable prices for using Ecosystem54.
Our system is based on the widely used Python Flask framework. Ecosystem54 is not a proprietary system, since its main components are open source. Ecosystem54 is easy to maintain and can be modified by other companies and developers.
You can find out more about Ecosystem54 on the official Ecosystem54 website
Is your IT infrastructure ready for a new stage of development?
If you cannot confidently answer “Yes,” then we suggest asking our specialists this question and assessing the situation together. Get a consultation!
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