IT infrastructure modernization is essential to keep apace with ever-changing business needs and new technology, but it can feel overwhelming. Especially in edge computing environments, where changes can be complex.
Whether you’re managing a handful of edge sites or dozens of remote locations, the same core steps apply. You don’t need to modernize everything overnight. You just need to start moving in the right direction.
Here are some simple tips for how to approach it, from laying the groundwork to building for the future. You can also read a more detailed approach in our informative IT infrastructure modernization roadmap guide.
Step 1: Foundation and Strategy
Before you can modernize anything, you need to know exactly what you’re working with.
Start by documenting your existing infrastructure. That means a full inventory of edge sites, physical characteristics, available power and cooling, network connectivity, on-site IT capabilities, and the applications running at each location, including dependencies, criticality, and performance requirements. Hardware specs and age, storage systems, hypervisor platforms, and backup systems all need to be captured, too.
From there, identify what’s actually causing problems. Frequent downtime, single points of failure, manual processes that don’t scale, hardware refresh cycles creeping up, ballooning licensing costs, and slow deployment timelines. Document all of it with specific examples.
Then set measurable goals. Define uptime requirements, recovery time objectives, how quickly you need to deploy new sites, and what total cost of ownership you’re targeting. Your assessment should produce a prioritized list of locations or workloads to tackle first, with clear constraints around budget, timeline, and available resources.
Step 2: Technology and Software Choices
Did you know, virtualization is a straightforward, low cost method of making your IT infrastructure modernization project possible, especially in an edge computing IT environment.
Virtualization abstracts physical hardware into software-defined resources, allowing multiple virtual machines (VMs) to run on shared physical servers, eliminating hardware dependencies and enabling better resource utilization across your environment.
There are two main approaches to integrated infrastructure. Converged Infrastructure (CI) provides pre-configured hardware bundles that reduce integration time, but still requires separate management of storage, compute, and virtualization layers.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) goes further, virtualizing everything from one dashboard. See an example here. For edge environments, HCI eliminates the complexity of managing separate infrastructure components and integrates with existing systems, so you don’t need to rip and replace what you already have.
A virtual SAN (vSAN) is also worth considering. It enables high availability without expensive SAN hardware at every location, creating resilient storage pools from standard servers.
Top Tip: Virtualization means your physical servers and your software no longer age at the same rate. When hardware reaches end-of-life, the software layer carries forward. That puts you in control of hardware refresh timing, so your business drives infrastructure decisions rather than the other way around. Learn more about how to extend hardware refresh lifecycles in our informative blog.
Step 3: Execution and Best Practices
Workload migration is an inevitable part of IT transformation. Here’s how to set yourself up for success.
Make Your Plans Smart: Plan migrations during low-traffic windows and use live migration tools where possible. Test in a staging environment first and build rollback plans for each workload. When you migrate with high availability architectures in place, your applications stay running during the transition.
Document Dependencies: Before migrating, document application dependencies, hardware requirements, and performance baselines. For legacy apps that need special handling, consider containerization or dedicated physical hosts within your modern infrastructure.
Consider Redundancy: Build redundancy into your migration infrastructure from the start. For edge locations especially, planning with multiple fallback options at each step avoids extended downtime and costly site visits.
Manage People: Invest in training before you need it, and choose infrastructure that is straightforward to deploy and manage. Complexity kills momentum for your IT teams, and they need to be able to easily transition to new technology.
Choose Transparent Pricing: Finally, choose licensing that is transparent and predictable across your entire distributed infrastructure. A model that seems reasonable for one location can become expensive fast when applied across dozens of sites.
Step 4: IT Capacity Management
Capacity management is the process of balancing your current IT capacity against forecasted needs. If you run out of capacity then everything can practically grind to a halt. If you overbuy, you’re wasting budget on unused resources. Getting it right requires a bit of strategy, not guesswork.
Start by establishing baseline metrics. Collect this data over weeks and months, not just days, so you understand workday peaks, month-end spikes, and seasonal variations. From there, forecast future needs by plotting utilization over time and talking to your IT teams about their upcoming needs. Set thresholds that trigger proactive responses, not reactive ones, and make sure existing resources are being used efficiently before adding more.
Top Tip: Many VMs are provisioned with excessive CPU, memory, or storage that’s never used. Rebalancing those frees capacity without any hardware investment. Software with a centralized management tool makes all of this significantly easier. When you can see your entire environment from one dashboard, it all stops becoming guesswork.
Step 5: Managing the People Side of Change
A successful IT infrastructure modernization project is dependant on people. It’s your team who use and manage your infrastructure, and if they were to resist the change, your project could be impacted.
Consider the IT administrator who has spent ten years mastering your legacy systems. They know every quirk, every workaround, every way to troubleshoot problems fast. Now you’re asking them to learn something new!
Provide role-specific training, delivered just before people will actually use those skills. You could also identify “champions” across different locations in your business, being people who can advocate for the change and help colleagues adapt. Celebrate visible progress at major milestones, be transparent about setbacks, and document new operational procedures while they’re fresh.
Step 6: Building Your Modernization Roadmap
With the groundwork laid, the roadmap itself follows three phases.
Pilot Deployment
Start at a single edge location or in a lab environment with non-critical workloads. This validates the solution in your specific environment and surfaces integration issues before they affect production systems. In theory, you could use this environment to demo or train your IT team on deployment procedures, management interfaces, and troubleshooting. Then you can refine your process based on what you learn before moving to production sites.
Phased Rollout
Select initial production sites based on business criticality and technical complexity. Start with sites that have significant pain points but aren’t your most critical operations. Importantly, this demonstrates value to your wider team, quickly, while managing risk.
To improve the success of your rollout, monitor closely, track uptime and management effort, document any issues and resolution steps, and use the experience to refine your further deployment process.
Ongoing Optimization
After deployment, shift focus to efficiency. Analyze resource utilization patterns across sites. Some locations may be over-provisioned, others under-provisioned. Test new configurations in non-production environments before rolling them out, and when you find optimizations that work, apply them consistently across all sites.
Choosing software that has a centralized management system enables a shift from reactive to proactive operations. Instead of constantly troubleshooting issues at individual sites, your team can view any issues from a single source, making improvements and optimization processes much more straightforward.
Modernizing IT is a Journey, Not a Sprint
Found this interesting? Take a look at our comprehensive IT infrastructure modernization roadmap guide, for a more detailed view of what makes an IT transformation project successful in enterprise and edge IT environments.
