INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY CONSULTANCY SERVICES

  • Strategy
  • Discovery / Documentation
  • Assessments / Evaluations
  • Architectural Design

The one constant in IT is that the pace of change is ever increasing.  Daily, IT organizations face challenges that strain the ability of their team to deliver timely results.  Sometimes IT needs to respond to planned business growth and environment change, sometimes they need to react to external forces driving businesses to take advantage of market opportunities or to maintain a competitive advantage.

Throughout it all, you are faced with the age-old IT requirements to improve application uptime and reduce risk. Technical advances have made things both easier and at the same time more complex, now a mixture of traditionally hosted, virtualized, cloud and SaaS based applications need to work in concert to deliver enterprise services to end-users.

RBA has the broad range of technical expertise and business experience needed to help you successfully address business change and manage the transition to this new, hybrid computing environment.  Our Principal Consultants can help you develop, revise, and extend your compute strategy to most cost effectively deliver the services your business requires, and then also help you implement and support that strategy over the long term.

Strategy

The world within which IT organizations operate is ever-changing, and successful organizations need to rapidly react to shifts in business environment and technical capability. Frequent technology shifts change the way you work, the tools you use, and the operational procedures you require. To meet the challenge, RBA can help you develop short, mid, and long-term strategies to address these opportunities and challenges.

RBA’s Principal Consultants have deep technical expertise in all types of servers, networks, security and storage technologies, and the business experience and acumen to know when and how to deploy them. And, because RBA is completely vendor-independent, you can rest assured that our recommendations are made in your best interest, not designed to maximize commissions or referral fees.

Discovery / Documentation

For many IT organizations, the process of developing a computing strategy needs to begin with a comprehensive inventory of currently installed assets, ranging from physical devices (servers, storage, network devices) to network bandwidth and utilization, to application portfolios and application interdependencies. Using both commercially available and our own purpose built tools, RBA will discover and document your current computing infrastructure.

Assessments / Evaluations

Based on our deep knowledge of industry best practices and technology, RBA’s principal Consultants can help you assess the current state of your IT organization from a broad range of perspectives. Each organization is different, and each assessment is customized to address the needs of the individual organization, but questions frequently addressed in our IT assessments include:

  • Do I have the right plans in place with which to manage my operation: Service Level delivery, Security, Backups, Disaster Recovery, Infrastructure Maintenance, Risk Management, Application Growth and Migration, etc.?
  • Do I have the right people in the organization to deliver on these plans; where am I under/overstaffed, where are my risks?
  • Do I have the infrastructure I need to deliver the services my business requires?
  • Are my network, storage, or server architectures well thought out and able to deliver the service levels I need at the right cost?
  • Is my infrastructure delivering the needed services at a reasonable cost?

Through a thorough, customized assessment of your organization, our review will pinpoint strengths and weaknesses and provide recommendations for remediation to address deficiencies. And, since RBA does not operate as a VAR or broker, we have no product biases. We are not limited by a specific product portfolio and will recommend the best solution that meets your technical, business and budget requirements.

Architectural Design

RBA’s consultants have the deep technical expertise to skillfully develop architectural plans for even the most complex IT environments. We have developed architectures for everything from small, in-house datacenters, to fully distributed, high-availability, large-scale e-commerce web deployments. For most companies, these projects are asymmetrical – you may need a network architect for a month – and then only part time on an ongoing basis.

Hiring a deeply technical operations team is at best a series of compromises:

  • Should you recruit expensive, hard to retain specialists or a broad generalist?
  • Do you hire based on most urgent needs or to support the long term strategy?
  • How do you balance needs for architects, implementers and administrators?

These tradeoffs are the symptom of a larger problem. By its very nature, good infrastructure management will often require specialists. Yet few budgets can justify dedicated technical expertise always be on hand just in case they’re needed. The RBA team can augment your staff bringing the same “big and broad” IT capabilities of the large companies – at a fraction of the cost. This “IT on demand” lowers operating expense while improving overall service delivery. RBA is a logical choice for companies that want deep IT expertise on their side, but do not want to deal with the costs and management focus that in-house capabilities sometimes require. And, because we’re not resellers of any vendor’s equipment or technology, we won’t restrict your choice of technology – operating systems, servers, networks, storage – we help you leverage the technology and products you need to run your business most efficiently.