Make your IT scaling strategies a success: IT infrastructure scaling with Virima
Table of Contents
- Vertical and horizontal scaling: Two approaches for your IT infrastructure optimization
- IT infrastructure scaling with Virima: Optimize your IT infrastructure scaling
- IT infrastructure scaling with Virima’s expertise and tools
As businesses grow, the need for IT infrastructure optimization rises. But what does this ‘optimization’ mean? It means the careful implementation of IT scaling strategies. To put simply, adding resources to keep up with the demands of end-users– customers and employees.
However, scaling IT infrastructure is not a simple task. It encompasses encountering challenges such as having in-depth IT visibility into the current state of IT infrastructure. Especially how it’s spread across data centers, clouds, edge, and others. Then comes the difficulties with resource allocation, and cost management.
Apart from this, organizations often encounter the fear of compromising security during the scaling process. As infrastructure expands, the risk of data breaches and vulnerabilities becomes a growing concern. These complexities can create roadblocks and stall the scaling process.
However, with the right tools and expertise, these challenges can be effectively tackled to scale your IT infrastructure effectively. In this blog post, we’ll explore how you can carry out your IT infrastructure scaling with Virima. But before that let’s understand a few basics of implementing IT scaling strategies.
Vertical and horizontal scaling: Two approaches for your IT infrastructure optimization
IT scaling strategies often involve two common approaches: one is vertical scaling and the other is horizontal scaling.
Vertical scaling
Vertical scaling, also known as scaling up, involves adding more resources to a single server or machine to handle increased demand. It’s like adding more power to your existing system. Think of it as upgrading your hardware components, such as installing a faster CPU, and more memory, or plugging in more storage capacity.
It’s a suitable option for organizations that have applications requiring more processing power or memory. It doesn’t require major architectural changes and offers immediate capacity upgrades. However, there are limits to how far you can scale vertically. And there may be a point where additional resources become too costly.
In a cloud environment, if you’re using a cloud service like Amazon Web Services (AWS), you can vertically scale by using instances from the EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) family that offer different levels of resources. A higher-tier instance type increases the computing power and memory available to your application.
Horizontal scaling
In contrast to vertical scaling, horizontal scaling, also known as scaling out, involves adding more servers or machines to distribute the workload across multiple systems. In many cases, the added resources hold similar configurations. This approach allows you to handle increased demand by adding more resources in parallel.
It offers greater scalability potential as it allows you to add more machines as needed. It provides the flexibility to distribute the workload evenly and handle sudden traffic spikes. In the case of a video streaming service, for example, additional servers can be added to handle the increased streaming requests. Each server contributes its processing power and storage. This will result in increased capacity and improved performance.
In a cloud environment, horizontal scaling is achieved by adding more instances, say virtual machines, and distributing the load across them. If you’re using Microsoft Azure, you can configure an auto-scaling rule. According to the rules you set, virtual machines will be dynamically added or removed, such as CPU utilization or network traffic.
However, implementing horizontal scaling may require changes to your application architecture, like incorporating load balancers and ensuring data synchronization across multiple servers.
When implementing IT scaling strategies with a vertical and horizontal approach, you’ve to ensure that you have the right tools in place to help you guide your IT infrastructure optimization.
IT infrastructure scaling with Virima: Optimize your IT infrastructure scaling
IT visibility for scaling with Discovery and Service mapping
Scaling your IT infrastructure requires a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of your existing IT environment. It means knowing all active devices, operating systems, applications, their attributes, and their dependencies. To put it simply, you need an IT asset inventory that lists IT assets across your cloud providers and on-premise environments. For that, you can integrate IT discovery tools such as Virima IT asset discovery. Its agentless (IP-based) discovery probes will do tha job. All you need is to specify the subnet and rages for scanning and you’ll have an up-to-date asset inventory.
IT discovery provides real-time visibility into virtual machines, containers, databases, and other cloud-based services. Just add the API credentials of your cloud account (Amazon, Azure, or anything else), and the custom setup IT discovery probes will create the cloud inventory for you.
Thus when trying vertical scaling you’ll know exactly what and where to add additional resources.
Entering ViVID™service mapping
In horizontal scaling, the need to understand the dependencies between the cloud services and applications is greater. This is to ensure you analyze the impact of adding or removing instances on workload distribution, data synchronization, and overall performance. In this regard, service mapping tools such as ViVID™ service mapping automatically establish the relationship and dependencies from the IT discovery data.
Such a relationship and dependency view sheds light on how changes to one element may impact others when scaling.
Note: ViVID™ service mapping capabilities come natively integrated with Virima Discovery.
ITAM for informed decision-making: Resource allocation and cost management
Once you know how your IT infrastructure is spread across data centers and the cloud, comes the need to have in-depth IT visibility on the usage of IT assets under scaling needs. For example, to vertically scale on-premise infrastructure by upgrading servers, organizations first need to analyze the utilization of existing servers. Using ITAM tools, you can identify servers that are underutilized or nearing their maximum capacity.
Similarly, when horizontally scaling cloud infrastructure by provisioning virtual machines, Virima’s ITAM can track the usage metrics of existing instances. This information guides decision-making on the number and type of instances to be added for optimal workload distribution and performance improvement.
Cost optimization
IT asset management (ITAM) tools also track software license usage. As a result, it provides insights into the utilization of licenses across the organization. They identify areas where licenses may be underutilized or where additional licenses are required. This proactive analysis helps optimize licensing costs during infrastructure scaling, ensuring that the organization is efficiently utilizing its software assets.
For instance, when scaling a cloud environment, Virima ITAM can detect instances that are running software applications that are not properly licensed or instances exceeding licensed usage. By addressing these compliance issues during scaling, organizations can avoid potential penalties and optimize their software license costs.
In this way, you can ensure compliance and optimize costs when adding software licenses to your added hardware or VM or transferring or moving them between.
Ensuring consistent security as you scale with CSAM
As you carry out IT infrastructure optimization in the form of adding up resources, the IT environment becomes more large and complex. Without adequate security measures in place, these new additions can become entry points for malicious actors looking to exploit weaknesses and gain unauthorized access to your systems or data.
Moreover, keeping pace with the infrastructure scaling, the amount of data you collect, store and transmit also increases. Hence, it’s essential to have a security measure in place to protect this data that may contain customer, financial records, intellectual property, and confidential business data from unauthorized access, data breaches, or theft.
When you select your IT infrastructure scaling with Virima, its CSAM (Cybersecurity Asset Management) features come into play. Its robust capabilities ensure consistent security as organizations scale their IT infrastructure.
The CSAM carries out regular full IT asset inventory scans to find out any unmanaged, rogue devices and identify any vulnerabilities that may have arisen due to such devices. This monitoring also includes software licenses to ensure any outdated or unauthorized software-led security breaches are prevented.
Moreover, when vulnerabilities are identified, the CSAM projects them on the integrated ViVID™ service maps as NIST NVD vulnerabilities. The NDV categorization of vulnerabilities helps in setting up the priorities for remediation. It gives a clear idea of the criticality of the supported services by the level of vulnerabilities the asset have.
Maintaining proper security hygiene with CSAM
A part of the proactive approach in managing vulnerabilities as you scale is to ensure proper hygiene maintenance across the IT network. This includes implementing the latest security patches to keep all the devices and software up-to-date (Windows). Also, upgrading devices as needed and assigning responsibilities by identifying device owners. This is done to make the device owner a part of effective risk management and accountability.
Last but not least, is to avoid potential threats that may arise as you dispose of retired assets. The CSAM provides you with the required information to comply with data privacy regulations for the process of decommissioning.
CMDB to keep all IT infrastructure data current
As organizations deploy new hardware, software, or cloud-based assets, they need to have full control and visibility over them. That’s where the role of a CMDB comes in. You can move all your discovered assets to CMDB, and then assign ownership, and track critical attributes for each asset. As your IT infrastructure scaling with Virima continues, you can schedule automated set-and-forget scans for a hand-free approach.
This helps organizations have complete visibility into their assets, associated dependencies, and configurations. Virima CMDB enhances this IT visibility of dependencies with integration to ViVID™ service maps. The maps provide dynamic interactive network topology and infrastructure views of the whole IT environment.
When scaling an IT infrastructure, the rate of changes increases, making it challenging to track and authorize updates. A CMDB provides a record of the up-to-date configuration of IT assets. In this regard, Virima CMDB leverages automated discovery to keep all asset-related data current as you make changes to your IT infrastructure as part of your IT scaling strategies.
IT governance and compliance enforcement are essential for security and auditability, particularly as IT infrastructure scales. A CMDB can help organizations maintain compliance with regulations and standards by providing visibility into their IT environment’s configuration changes and monitoring the impact of those changes on internal policies and established controls.
IT infrastructure scaling with Virima’s expertise and tools
Scaling your IT infrastructure is critical for adapting to the changing technology landscape and meeting the growing needs of your organization. However, scaling requires careful planning and execution to ensure optimal results. With Virima’s expertise and tools, organizations can optimize their infrastructure scaling efforts. Virima’s Discovery and Service mapping solutions provide a comprehensive infrastructure overview. This enables organizations to understand the current state of their IT environment and identify areas for improvement. When it comes to informed decision-making with asset usage data, Virima’s IT asset management (ITAM) capabilities steal the show.
As you implement IT scaling strategies, Virima’s Cyber Security Asset Management (CSAM) capabilities help prioritize security. The Cyber Security and Asset Management (CSAM) feature ensures consistent security across the entire IT infrastructure by preventing malicious actors from taking advantage of potential security holes as scaling progresses. Further, Virima’s Configuration Management Database (CMDB) provides organizations with a complete inventory of their IT assets and their relationships, making it easier to manage and track their assets throughout their life cycle.
Book a demo to learn more about how your IT infrastructure scaling with Virima can make your IT scaling strategies a success!
