Most of us are all too familiar with the ambiguity of the phrase “good enough” as it pertains to a product or service we want or need. It usually represents a discounted option that may, in many cases, be inferior to a more expensive or better-made alternative. While we all like to save a few dollars, we are left considering if it was worth it when that cheap leash breaks and we spend an afternoon chasing our dog through the neighborhood.
IT decision-makers must be aware of the dangers and hidden costs of ‘good enough” IT infrastructure. It can be challenging to stay within a company’s IT budget while providing the power and functionality needed to meet business requirements, and it is tempting to settle for less expensive but potentially substandard solutions. The wrong choices can result in serious effects on your computing environment and disrupt your business.
Why You Need to Avoid “Good Enough” Infrastructure Solutions
Companies need to stay away from simply “good enough” infrastructure solutions for the following reasons. The initial financial benefits or convenience of these options may be attractive, but are often negated by their long-term deficiencies. Systems that may seem sufficient to handle normal business requirements may fail under stress, be unable to scale to address evolving conditions, or be more easily compromised by threat actors.
Downtime is expensive
It can cost companies that rely on their IT environment thousands of dollars per minute during unplanned downtime. A “good enough” environment is typically not architected and built with well-tested, effective redundancy and failover capabilities. Businesses can experience outages that lead to SLA breaches and lost revenue due to multiple oversights in their infrastructure.
- Teams may not address single points of failure effectively due to budgetary constraints.
- A company may be using slow, manual recovery procedures that extend outages.
- An organization may tolerate minor faults that suddenly cascade into downtime.
Degraded performance is costly
Companies may look to reduce capital costs by sizing their IT environment for average demand. Teams can choose to provision just enough resources, such as CPU, memory, and network bandwidth, to get by under typical circumstances. But in today’s dynamic business environment, circumstances can change rapidly and unpredictably. Businesses that experience success with a new product or service can find their infrastructure overwhelmed during periods of high demand and traffic peaks.
The IT environment can experience degraded performance due to issues such as resource contention, excessive latency, and network bottlenecks. The bad performance delivers a poor user experience and may lead to lost customers. It is difficult to attract new business when systems are slow, and users are forced to abandon transactions.
Lack of robust security is dangerous
A “good enough” infrastructure typically implements standard, baseline security measures and misses opportunities to harden the environment. The resulting lax security leads to an expanded attack surface, a higher risk of data breaches, and expensive incident response. The following common oversights put a business at risk from malicious threat actors.
- Teams that fail to develop and follow sound patching practices risk being targeted by attacks exploiting known, addressable vulnerabilities.
- Organizations risk breaches by external or internal actors due to poor data classification and inadequate network segmentation.
- Companies that deploy only basic monitoring solutions cannot effectively detect incursions by sophisticated adversaries.
Basic backups do not provide resilience
Organizations must be cautious of implementing backup solutions that do not deliver the required resilience and business continuity they expect. Companies cannot be satisfied simply because copies of their data exist. They must be confident that the data can be recovered efficiently to maintain business operations, meet customer expectations, and avoid extended outages.
Businesses face the following risks when using an inefficient backup solution.
- Teams may be forced to use slow, manual recovery processes that cannot meet a company’s recovery time objectives (RTOs).
- The business can lose significant data if backup frequency does not align with recovery point objectives (RPOs).
- Companies without a tested disaster recovery plan risk losing the entire business to a prolonged outage.
Lost opportunities for growth
Companies that build their infrastructure with a “good enough” approach may struggle to compete with more agile rivals. They may be relying on legacy systems and temporary fixes to problems rather than investing in modern cloud-native solutions built on flexible microservices. These choices make it more difficult to implement new features to address changing customer and business trends.
Modern businesses need a flexible, scalable infrastructure built to maximize competitiveness. They must be able to quickly pivot and adopt new strategies to capitalize on emerging opportunities. Customers typically prefer businesses that provide innovative solutions and may steer clear of companies that rely on traditional techniques.
Convenience may be constraining
IT decision-makers may prioritize convenience by adopting mediocre solutions from a single provider. This approach may streamline contract finalization and simplify accounting procedures, but at the risk of limiting flexibility and portability. Companies can find themselves tightly coupled to platforms or applications that no longer address business requirements effectively.
When faced with this situation, companies may be forced into expensive migrations to regain their competitive edge and meet future demands. What once seemed convenient and cost-effective can become a high-priced mistake that must be corrected.
VAST’s Solutions for Better IT Infrastructure
At VAST, we understand the difference between apparently adequate systems and the operational realities of modern business. Our experts can help your company optimize its current infrastructure or architect a new environment to meet your needs. We offer multiple services focused on your organization’s infrastructure requirements.
- Our team creates scalable, supportable IT infrastructure that includes data protection and disaster recovery for on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.
- Our managed infrastructure services optimize your on-premises environment and fill in-house skill gaps with seasoned professionals.
- We offer cloud infrastructure services that ensure your cloud environment aligns with your business needs.
- Our Data Center Transformation services help you move from a “good enough” to a top-notch infrastructure that delivers the agility and flexibility your business needs to flourish.
Get in touch today and learn how we can help you avoid the hidden costs of “good enough” infrastructure.
