Infrastructure management is the management of both technical and operational components—including hardware, software, policies, processes, data, facilities and equipment—for business effectiveness. It may be divided into systems management, network management and storage management. Enterprises use IT infrastructure management to: reduce duplication of effort; ensure compliance to IT standards and regulations; improve information flow; support flexibility in changing business markets; promote IT interoperability; maintain effective change management; and reduce overall IT costs.
IT infrastructure management helps organizations manage their IT resources in accordance with business needs and priorities. Aligning IT management with business strategy allows technology to create value—rather than drain resources—for the entire organization. Instead of dedicating IT resources to each computing technology and each line of business and managing them separately, IT infrastructure management converges the management of servers, applications, storage, networking, security and IT facilities. Integrated and automated management improves IT efficiency and agility, ultimately affecting business profitability.
IT infrastructure management tools can improve change management and protect the interdependencies in converged IT environments. For example, deploying, updating, patching and configuring multiple servers and systems can be automated with SUSE Manager, a program that manages and monitors Linux servers across physical, virtual and cloud environments. It manages a variety of hardware architectures, hypervisors and cloud platforms. Enterprises may use SUSE Manager to centralize the management of their Linux systems, virtual machines and other software-defined infrastructure (SDI) components. It can provide automated software, asset, patch and configuration management as well as system provisioning, orchestration and monitoring.