Discipline
Infrastructure and platform
Knowing the real state of the platform everything else runs on, and what to do about it before committing budget.
5 services in this discipline
This is yours if
Three signs that this is yours.
- A third party built the platform, and the same third party assessed whether it was built well.
- The vendor changed the licensing model and the renewal arrived with a different number.
- Two people hold up your operation and both are close to retiring.
Use this today, without hiring anyone
Infrastructure Health Check
The eight fronts an infrastructure review has to cover, and the order worth looking at them in. Use it to demand scope from anyone offering you one, free ones included:
- Single points of failure first, because they are the only thing that can stop everything and are rarely inventoried.
- Monitoring coverage second, because it decides whether everything else you know is reliable or partial.
- Backup and recovery, with the question that settles it: when was the last restore actually tested.
- Capacity, measured at peak, not on averages.
- Performance, which is not the same as capacity: where the real bottleneck sits for the services you care about, and how much of the slowness lives in configuration and operation before it lives in hardware.
- Virtualization platform: configuration, versions, and drift from what is supported.
- Network: redundant paths that quietly share one physical device.
- Lifecycle and patching last, because everyone looks at it first and it holds the fewest surprises.
The first three explain almost every outage. The last three explain almost every invoice. The fourth and the fifth explain what your users complain about every day while nothing is down.
It comes from Infrastructure Health Check. Every service in this discipline brings its own.
The 5 services in this discipline
What if the review of your platform did not end in a quote?
I have to commit budget on a platform I inherited.
The real state of your platform: what can stop it, what is slowing it down, and how much of that gets fixed without buying anything. And a report that does not end up selling you anything.
See the situationStay or MigrateStay on the platform you have, or migrate, and with what numbers do you defend that call?
The licensing model changed and we have to decide whether we stay.
The real break-even between staying and migrating, run on your volumes, with the cost of operating the destination included.
See the situationMainframe succession programWhat happens when the two people who hold up your core system retire?
The person who knows retires in eighteen months and there is nobody to replace them.
The critical knowledge documented and the successors certified operating alone before the specialist leaves.
See the situationWhere inference runsWhat does your AI actually cost, depending on where it runs?
Upstairs they want to bring it in-house and I am the one who will have to operate whatever they decide.
Your break-even point calculated with your volumes, and the failure mode you take on if you decide to self host.
See the situationPost-quantum inventoryWhere does your organization encrypt, and what happens when that encryption expires?
The cryptography is spread across twenty years of systems.
Where your organization uses cryptography, what each scheme protects and how many years that data must stay secret, with the roadmap of what to migrate first.
See the situationThe other disciplines
AI strategy
12AI governance and compliance
9Automation and agents
8Data and analytics
5Cybersecurity and resilience
4Critical operations and crisis
5Mergers, separation and diligence
4Cost of AI and software
5Or see it by the cycle: Vanguard, Forge and Taskforce. Or by the question you arrive with, in the seven questions. And if you already know the name, there is the full list.
What is the decision you have in front of you this week?