How Lack of Visibility Can Break Your Infrastructure Upgrade Strategy

Modern technology is constantly changing and evolving. This means there’s a constant pressure to keep technology infrastructure up to date with all the necessary updates and upgrades. Regularly updating your infrastructure ensures compliance, removes inefficiencies, reduces maintenance costs and eliminates legacy support fees. In short, it improves the overall efficiency and reduces the cost to own of your technology estate.

Keeping up with infrastructure upgrades can be a significant undertaking, often hindered by the complexity of modern technology environments. Keeping a complete oversight of all IT, OT, IoT, and Cloud devices is a herculean effort, but without complete visibility it is impossible to guarantee that all systems are up to date and being used as efficiently as possible. In this blog, we will explore how you can overcome this lack of visibility when upgrading your technology infrastructure.

The Trouble With Visibility

Understanding the current state of your IT infrastructure is essential for ensuring that upgrades align with your organization’s needs and objectives. To guarantee a good understanding, you need comprehensive oversight. In modern, highly complex technology environments ensuring visibility of all assets can be a significant stumbling block. Managing the mix of on-premise systems, IoT devices, cloud infrastructure, and operational technology, often spread over multiple locations, is an unprecedented challenge.

According to Gartner’s Cybersecurity Controls Assessment benchmark of 2023 only 17% of organisations can clearly identify and inventory 95% or more of their assets. A lack of visibility makes it difficult to identify EOL devices, pinpoint performance bottlenecks, critical dependencies, configuration drifts, and more. These issues in turn lead to inefficiencies, unplanned downtime, and increased security risks that will only be noticed when they are already causing issues.

Fuel Your Tech Stack With Real-Time Asset Data

Manually keeping track of the modern technology environment is practically impossible, and when attempted, incredibly time consuming. Automated discovery and inventory tools that continuously monitor your IT environment provide a real-time overview of every asset in your technology estate. These tools automatically detect every device in your network infrastructure, as well as installed software, users, configurations, and network connections.

A reliable inventory tool also collects detailed device information that is essential when planning infrastructure upgrades like warranty information, hardware and software EOL status, performance metrics and software & firmware versions. Integrating this data with specialized tools can significantly improve the efficiency of the upgrade process.

Detailed software usage data allows your license compliance tools to accurately map license costs and suggest software or license consolidations to save cost. Additional detail gives additional context to your security tools to improve risk analysis. IT service management (ITSM) systems can improve their use cases like change management to address EOL devices, software & firmware upgrades and more before they cause downtime.

Best Practices for Visibility

The right tooling is a great start to improve your visibility, but there are other ways you can ensure nothing in your technology environment escapes your attention during your infrastructure upgrade process:

• For hardware: Regularly audit devices to detect configuration drift, track hardware lifecycles and warranties, and assess resource usage to ensure compliance, optimize performance, and plan proactive replacements.
• For network equipment: Identify dependencies and bottlenecks with network topology maps, monitor key performance and capacity metrics, keep track of lifecycles and plan regular firmware updates to ensure optimal performance.
• For software: Implement an automated change management process to ensure software remains up-to-date and secure. Standardize your software suite across the organization and review the compatibility of business-critical services with newer operating systems to avoid disruptions.
• For operational technology: Regularly review hardware lifecycles and proactively plan your updates and replacements to ensure optimal performance.
• For public cloud resources: Maintain an accurate inventory of instances, storage and workloads with cloud monitoring tools. Assess resource usage to cut unnecessary expenses and optimize performance.

Comprehensive Oversight of Your Technology Estate With Lansweeper

Lansweeper’s comprehensive Technology Asset Intelligence solution is designed to provide you with unmatched visibility into your entire technology environment. It automatically discovers every IT, OT, IoT, and cloud asset that makes up technology estate and creates a complete and comprehensive inventory of your asset data with details like:

• Configuration
• Hardware and OS lifecycle information
• Warranty status
• Asset-user relations
• Performance information

Thanks to Lansweeper’s unrivalled breadth and depth of asset detail, you always have the date you need or a successful infrastructure upgrade strategy at your fingertips.