How to Optimize and Audit IT Systems

How to optimize and audit IT systems, as well as set up a capacity management process. The infrastructure of technology companies is built 90% on solutions from foreign providers.

The end of technical support and the difficulty of supplying new equipment puts business continuity and growth at risk. Of course, hardware systems have a certain safety margin, but without new purchases, the expansion and development of information systems may be in jeopardy, forcing organizations to gradually abandon new product development and reallocate resources to new products. favor of critical services.

The resource shortage problem can be solved by optimizing the operation of the application and system software. In the last decade, when introducing information systems, only a few companies have focused on improving the performance of systems on the same hardware: as a rule, additional servers were purchased instead, and the potential of existing software remained unfulfilled. blow.

However, statistics from a study based on more than 500 load test projects showed that, due to software optimization, it is possible to increase system performance by 1.5 to 3 times in 80% of cases. cases, which in itself can significantly save on the purchase of a new computer.

Load testing allows you to simulate an industrial load and then, during the testing process, identify bottlenecks that prevent further performance growth. The load test itself is built in such a way that it reflects the operation of the system in industrial operation with a fairly high accuracy, at least 80-90%, if we take into account the operations that require the most resources. This allows you to see how the IT system will actually behave under certain conditions.

How to optimize and audit IT systems, as well as set up a capacity management process

The process of optimizing IT systems consists of the following steps:

• Identify existing and potential inefficiencies in the software by performing load tests.
• Carry out a computer audit to find the causes and make recommendations for their elimination.
• Fix inefficient code in application software, optimize DBMS performance.
• Carry out repeated load tests to confirm the effects obtained.

Next comes the stage of auditing IT systems under load:

• Architectural audit, evaluation of technical solutions.
• Look for bottlenecks that lead to performance degradation.
• Source code review.
• Analysis of statistics and optimization of queries to the database.
• Software analysis for the presence of sanctions risks.
• Formation of proposals to make changes to the software.

The hardware is then optimized based on the bottlenecks identified by the load tests. The following measures can be used to achieve optimization:

• Change in the architecture of the application.
• Development of individual microservices.
• Queuing implementation.
• Technology change.
• Database optimization.

After repeated load tests, the effectiveness of the changes made is verified; if necessary, the software optimization cycle can be repeated.

It is recommended to perform load tests and further optimize performance:

● For highly loaded systems.

● For the Core systems of organizations (ABS, RBS, CRM, ERP, MDM, Document Management, BI, buses).

● If system downtime due to software and/or hardware failure costs the business more than $10 million per day.

● Reputation costs associated with service failures.

● If there is no backup equipment.

● If software optimization has never been performed and the capabilities of the current software and equipment are not understood.

● When there are incidents in the industrial operation related to productivity.