The Confusing State of IT Infrastructure

What Is System Infrastructure?

System infrastructure is a subset of information systems. The term primarily refers to middleware and hardware (e.g. servers and storage) that are not tied to separate business applications.

Systems are now built upon rapidly changing IT infrastructure technologies. Just by using these various technologies, companies are able to incorporate functionality into their systems that they would have developed independently as part of applications in the past.

The Large Technical Gap Between Infrastructure Vendors and Clients

IT infrastructure technology used to be extremely simple and only offer a minimal set of features. As a result, full-time IT infrastructure engineers were rarely needed to build systems; the application developers could double as infrastructure engineers.

With IT infrastructure technologies quickly growing in functionality, however, it has become possible to combine these technologies to build higher-quality systems more productively.

However, it still isn’t uncommon for application engineers to also be responsible for building system infrastructure. This prevents companies from building up institutional knowledge related to designing and building with rapidly changing IT infrastructure technologies and thus making adequate use of them.