For many years, most of the Fortune 100 companies had focused on internal organization therefore their IT infrastructure results to be very rigid and with a monolithic approach, missing a lot of opportunities to be more agile.
An Agile infrastructure can be the a real improvement for your IT infrastructure: the system should have virtualization and horizontal scaling capability. You have then flexibility and real time business intelligence which can increase productivity and efficiency.
Agile Infrastructure can be defined as the application of Agile Development to the design, maintanance and deployment of IT infrastructures.
Using Agile methodologies in infrastructure means for example the virtualization of computing, with infrastructure automation, and provisioning migrated to the cloud.
The result is shorter cycle times and delivering costs. A delivery time of over two months can be reduced to days.
The distribution of resources is always a way to increase the efficiency of connectivity and reduce the computing costs, adding also a security layer to a disaster recovery: this is the major reason why it is convenient connecting a group of end stations with a common set of requirements, regardless of whether they are located physically on the same LAN segment.
The Agile Manifesto applies also to non-functional requirements like security, logging, and monitoring. Adopting these principles help the company to organize priorities and have their regulatory systems in place.
Agile infrastructure can pack in Web Access Management (WAM), Single Sign On (SSO), Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Information Rights Management (IRM), Masking, Provisioning, Access Governance, Authentication and more.
An agile IT infrastructure should be fully integrated in all its parts: networks, servers, storage and security. The full integration helps the company to do any changes on the fly. It should be scalable in any moment. That all means superior design, execution at speed, and attentive, proactive day-to-day management. In order to achieve this level of performance you need to change approach to operations management. The entire teasm should focus on find issues at early stage and not only react to problems and focus more on the root causes than the momentary issues.