An Evaluation of Options to Optimize IT Infrastructure Costs

Businesses are under considerable pressure to cut their daily costs. Various costs are discussed constantly at higher levels of management. This creates pressure for IT department employees to create solutions that answer to modern IT requirements. This includes being able to meet customers’ requirements and business demands. Many published research papers state that running IT infrastructure in the cloud is more cost effective than traditional IT infrastructure hosting. This has resulted in traditional hosting providers arguing heavily against it. The objective of this thesis is to discover the most suitable IT infrastructure solution for the company to run with when a five-year plan is taken into consideration. This study will use methods such as comparison and evaluation to find the best new IT infrastructure. The three IT proposals are IaaS, On-premises and operating the business in the company’s Y hosting. When we are talking about on-premises we are referring to having a traditional server room in the same building as the company is working in. Hosting on the other hand means that server hardware is provided to the company on a monthly charging basis. IaaS stands for infrastructure as a service meaning that the virtual server is provided from a service provider to the company. In the findings from the data analysis section this thesis reaches the conclusion that IaaS Azure is the most cost effective solution when the five-year plan is taken into consideration. The reason for this is that hardware gets outdated quickly and needs to be replaced. The recommendation based on the findings is that companies should increasingly start thinking about building their new IT infrastructure in the cloud. One of the limitations of this thesis is that IT security policies are not taken into account when comparing and evaluating the three IT proposals; on-premises, hosting and IaaS Azure. Additionally, no frameworks have been used to determine the best new IT infrastructure solution for company X