IDX’s Enterprise IT Design practice assists businesses in validating their transformation goals, identifying and prioritizing the capabilities needed for success, and designing the IT operating model to effectively implement the plan. As enterprise architects, we design the blueprint for how companies should function in order to achieve their goals, as well as the path to get them there. We assist businesses in navigating and accelerating transformation by identifying and selecting high-value focus areas. This usually entails two key tasks: communicating a new vision that turns strategy into action and facilitating upfront dialogues that influence comprehensive process, organizational, and technology design.
We develop a thorough understanding of a business’s who, what, and how, as well as how that business is evolving and the possible futures that might affect the company’s business model. This allows the customer to operationalize IT while being adaptable and nimble in changing marketplaces.
We create industry-specific, client-tailored capability maps to assess a company’s current capabilities, determine which capabilities need to be transformed, prioritize those capabilities that differentiate the business – distinctive and competitive capabilities versus those that are simply required – and develop a roadmap for future investment.
We design IT based on the forecasted capabilities of the company which is in alignment with the planned vision and business model. Metrics and incentives are then reinforced to ensure cohesion to the approach.
New IT operating models are developed to facilitate the future-state capabilities of the business based on where and how the work is executed.
Networks are mission-critical for business functions and the design decisions behind those networks can have far-reaching implications. A well-planned and optimally designed network performs better, is more secure, more resilient, easier to manage, will scale, and be better positioned to adapt to future technologies.
Our team of Network Architects and Designers understand these attributes intimately. They take great pride in applying the following best practices when working with your team in developing the optimal network design for your business.
Designing networks that perform key business operations should be a well-thought-out process rather than a haphazard one. Spending enough time and money on the design process will result in a network that is cost-effective, manageable, and ready to expand.
Network security should be incorporated early in the design process rather than being added afterward. Incompatible security solutions can compromise network speed, user experience, and management if security is not considered in the design.
The resiliency of your network is key to predictable and stable operations. Designing resilience characteristics into the architecture of the network is critical to maintaining durability in its operations and to enabling your IT and Network teams the ability to quickly respond and adjust to changing operating dynamics.
We examine the type of scaling our company is likely to do, such as incremental customer growth or quick upscaling and downscaling of services to fit certain processes. Our network specialists design networks to make them scale easier and be more cost-effective.
Maintaining quality networks means they are being monitored and maintained. When designing networks, integrating and enabling effective visibility from network management systems (NMS) is always part of the agenda.
Businesses grow and change is constant; network topologies, security, and technology change, so your design must be adaptable. High-performing, cost-effective network designs are adjustable to accommodate these changes.
Design cyber resilience into the fabric of your enterprise.
Stay ahead of threats and reduce risk. Our expert security design services help you integrate cyber security across your IT environment and operations.
IDX Security design services help you assess risk and incorporate security by design capabilities to all facets of your environment, from threat intelligence & active defense to policy application and regulatory compliance. We apply design principles that focus on preventing cybersecurity breaches rather than simply enabling remediation after an attack.
We leverage proven design methodologies, intelligent automation, and industry-leading partners to develop robust designs and architectures to meet your business’s unique security needs.
Security by design is an approach to solution design that considers security at the onset. It does away with the “let’s cross the bridge when we get there” outlook on security and makes designs, solutions, platforms more secure. It is similar to designing a house and ensuring that it is earthquake-resistant.
Security by design ensures that security controls are built into a design, rather than as an afterthought. Such an approach reduces the likelihood of security breaches and has become common in solution design and product development.
Defense in Depth (DiD) is an approach to cybersecurity in which a series of defensive mechanisms are layered in order to protect valuable data and information. If one mechanism fails, another steps up immediately to thwart an attack. This multi-layered approach with intentional redundancies increases the security of a system as a whole and addresses many different attack vectors.
Despite the fact that monitoring and management are sometimes referred to as the “brains” of IT operations, poorly designed monitoring & management capabilities can pose major issues for many IT organizations and the businesses they support.
Many businesses tend to follow a domain-specific approach to IT monitoring, which typically results in high expenditures, a redundant tool portfolio, and tool integration which is often highly restrictive.
IDX helps businesses develop robust monitoring and management strategies and specific implementation designs that are built on top of a foundational monitoring & management framework. This framework removes redundancy in tooling, ensures effective integration between tools, and facilitates an effective IT oversight & governance capability for your business.
Our design methodology applies five key factors in developing effective monitoring/management capabilities and maximizing their value.
The monitoring & management framework provides a holistic strategy for understanding, deploying, and using IT monitoring tools. The objective of the framework is to maximize the flexibility of monitoring & management systems necessary to meet the needs of various IT support groups who depend upon these systems. This holistic strategy helps an IT organization create a context for each deployed product, and set enterprise-wide expectations for functionality and integration.
Event management is used to enable a proactive response and signal the expected or unexpected status of applications or infrastructure. A sound and repeatable event management design provides an organization the ability to quickly detect events, understand them, and then decide on an appropriate action to prevent an incident or disruption to a service from occurring.
A service design approach includes exception-based alerting, ensures event models are created, deployed, and revised in a controlled manner. It is important that monitoring be designed as a service design package (SDP)—a collection of documents that define and document a single monitoring service.
A key objective of any monitor & management capability is to enhance a business’ proactive avoidance of potential service disruptions. Many businesses find it challenging to demonstrate the continual improvement and value of these capabilities. A well-defined, structured continual improvement program (CIP) will enable the governance, coordination, and evaluation of any improvement efforts.
Foundational to any CIP is a defined measurement framework. A measurement framework for capability improvements will consist of critical success factors (CSFs), key performance indicators (KPIs), and operational measures (OMs) used to manage the effectiveness, efficiency, and compliance or assimilation of the operational management capability (i.e. event management).
Well-managed governance structures establish an organization’s vision and strategy; accelerate the organization’s alignment, adoption, and assimilation of the strategy; and balance the maturation and improvement of the monitoring & management capabilities in accordance with business objectives and constraints.
An effective and efficient governance framework includes an event management committee with executive-level membership representing the design, build, and operating domains of the IT organization (e.g. application and infrastructure).
