What is an IT Infrastructure Security & Management Solution?

The components of your organization’s IT infrastructure, including software, facilities and other network pieces, are more easily managed and secured with Perimeter 81.

IT Infrastructure Definition

In order to drive business functions and flows that contribute to the bottom line, IT – or information technology – is required in all departments. The IT team exists to support all this technology, which forms the underlying infrastructure spread across the organization: Hardware (PCs and servers, routers, firewalls etc.), software (SaaS platforms, locally installed licensed versions), data facilities and more.

IT infrastructure is how the IT team develops, tests, deploys, manages, and supports the services they bring to the organization itself. Critically, the resources that IT chooses for employees to use and for business flows to run on can be hosted locally, and supported locally by on-premises employees, or hosted in the cloud and supported by a third-party provider. Most organizations use a hybrid cloud approach whereby IT infrastructure spans both local solutions and on-demand, cloud-based ones.

Combined, this infrastructure exists in order for the enterprise to operate smoothly. That doesn’t always mean profit-seeking activities but also ideas that are integral to business success, such as security, data sharing, remote collaboration and communication, file storage, and more. It’s important to have an intelligent, forward-thinking strategy when planning IT infrastructure, and the consolidation of complementary, scalable tools is central to this idea.

How Does IT Infrastructure Work?

The OSI model of networks, or the Open Systems Interconnection model, is closely related to IT infrastructure. In fact, the first three layers of the OSI model are directly involved with infrastructural ideas – the Physical, Data Link, and Network layers. Physical hardware such as servers, office PCs, and even some (but not all) employee endpoint devices are part of IT infrastructure, and the two layers on top of it (Data and Network) are composed of the communication protocols that determine how traffic passes between hardware devices on Layer 1.

Setting all this up is IT’s job, but in most companies infrastructure is already built – based on its origins and how business processes evolved. If setting up IT infrastructure from scratch, however, it’s crucial to understand what your organization is trying to accomplish. Individual pieces of your IT infrastructure must contribute directly to organizational results. For example, a company that sells products will usually have a website, requiring a hosting server, and multiple supporting applications for customer relationship management, payments, support and more.

Purchasing and connecting the resources that make up your IT infrastructure is the easy part – it’s a matter of configuring tools to work together, granting access, and creating smart internal usage policies – but managing them in a scalable and secure manner is more difficult. Infrastructure isn’t unchanging. As the organisation expands and adds employees and new channels of growth, existing components must be able to flex outward (and sometimes inward) and also be resistant to infiltration from bad actors outside and inside the organization.

Benefits of IT Infrastructure Management

• Reduce IT Work: IT teams spend a lot of time on the management and security of their infrastructure components. With a unified third-party IT infrastructure service, all applications and their settings are connected and stored in one place on the cloud, making it simple to onboard and configure a new user. Adding new resources to the network is also simpler, and accomplished with a single click.
  
• Business Longevity & Continuity: Reliable, easily-managed IT infrastructure is one of the most vital pillars of business success. When infrastructure is stored in the cloud, resources are more available across various devices and even when the physical office isn’t accessible, ensuring that the business stays up and running should an unforeseen disaster occur.
  
• Reduce IT Costs: For IT, time is money, and so is hardware. IT infrastructure that’s managed by a provider means IT teams don’t have to spend on hardware appliances like firewalls. IT Infrastructure management is a remote-friendly solution that doesn’t require any extra hardware to set up or run effectively either, freeing up valuable IT manpower to work on more productive endeavors.
  
• Boost Employee Productivity: IT employees who have access to well-run, seamlessly integrated IT infrastructure are more productive, as they don’t need to deal with connection latency, gaps between resources that require extensive manual configuration or workarounds, or tiresome security precautions. The idea that employees can be efficient without the need to consider how they use their department’s tools is how it should be.
  
• Enable Remote Access: When the right IT infrastructure security solution is a part of your company, accessing resources remotely is easy. A good provider of managed IT infrastructure makes remote access a default concern, so that tools are both centrally managed but also accessible in a widespread, decentralized manner. Remote access products like RDP and Cloud VPN are integral to IT infrastructure governance but should be accompanied by other solutions to ensure that access is secure in remote conditions.
  
• Secure Your Data and Traffic: When consuming an IT infrastructure management service, threading components together with networking tools (for access, segmentation and more) is just one half of the equation. Security of these components, ideally also centralized and consumed with the single unified provider, is important as well, and ensures that traffic and data bouncing between your resources is protected from prying eyes.

Why Do Companies Need IT Infrastructure Management?

Organizations need to have a robust IT infrastructure framework so that their business flows – the processes that employees in all departments engage in to bring profits to the company – are as efficient as possible. On the other hand, maintaining and improving all the hardware and software that makes this possible is difficult – that’s a reason why we have IT teams – so companies often choose to organize and consolidate the orchestration of their tall IT stacks for the benefit of their IT employees.

Not only is setting up and connecting the various components of your IT infrastructure time intensive, it’s also important to do deliberately, so as to avoid issues with patching and configuration. Making mistakes during this process of connecting and configuring IT components isn’t just hard and time consuming, it’s also fraught with risks that stem from doing it incorrectly. Some of the most common exploits and attacks come from un-patched software or misaligned configurations, so going with a managed IT infrastructure service is recommended.

Secure and Unify Your IT Infrastructure

Perimeter 81’s cloud-friendly IT infrastructure solution is encapsulated in one Network as a Service product: A unified networking and security powerhouse enabling IT to quickly set up, segment, and secure any modern network for remote employees.

What Companies Achieve with Our IT Infrastructure Solution

1. Better visibility over traffic on the network
2. Integration with the cloud and local resources remote employees need
3. Secure, comprehensive, and low-latency remote network access
4. Network setup and user onboarding within just 15 minutes
5. Scale and secure resources as your company grows, with little effort

Capabilities of IT Infrastructure as a Service

Unified Management
A single cloud-based platform to connect and secure all local and cloud IT infrastructure on your network. Includes access management, monitoring, security and more.

Low Latency Access
Design your network for global users and put resources close to them. Our data backbone is made up of 40+ data centers providing access close to workers, for low latency.

Multi-layered Security
Enable 2FA, single sign-on, and automatic Wi-Fi protection across mobile devices using iOS and Android, PC and Mac desktops and the web when connected.

Zero Trust Access
Reduce the attack surface and make your network a miniscule target, by implementing least-privilege access policies based on role, devices, location and other qualifiers.

Looking for an IT Infrastructure Security Solution?

Benefits of NaaS and IT Infrastructure Management

Security on All Devices: BYOD policies multiply the number and variety of devices connecting to your IT infrastructure. Ensure only authorized devices connect to your resources with NaaS endpoint security.

Cloud Agnostic Integration: The ease with which our solution integrates into your infrastructure, whether local or cloud-based, enables organizations to protect all their resources in unified fashion.

Superior Quality Assurance: Connecting to your infrastructure through a diverse global server array helps the QA and marketing teams determine how best to target different markets, and how successful current efforts are.

Safe Remote Access: Automatic Wi-Fi security lets remote workers connect to sensitive resources from the public internet without fear of exposure, while encrypted tunnels shield data sharing from prying eyes.

Precise User Segmentation: Beyond the functions of traditional security tools, granular policy-based permissioning helps organizations exercise more control over those entering their virtual infrastructure.

IP Whitelisting: Explicitly define the IP addresses that are allowed to access the network, granting IT teams a stronger grip on security and also the ability to assign static IPs to automatically trusted sources of traffic.

The Perimeter 81 NaaS / IT Infrastructure Solution Includes:

• One-click network deployment
• User-friendly virtual desktop for Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS
• Manage cloud resources in a unified platform
• 24/7 knowledgeable customer support
• Unlimited bandwidth and data availability
• IT infrastructure monitoring software capabilities
• DNS Filtering
• Multiple global private and and public VPN gateways