#2 The IT tower and Sub Tower layer consists of eleven towers.
The Data Center tower includes purpose-built enterprise data center facilities and associated space, power, environment controls, racks, cabling, and smart hand support. It also includes
other facilities such as computer rooms, MDF, IDF, and Telco closets.
The Compute tower includes Windows, Linux and Unix physical and virtual
servers with associated hardware software, labor and support services. It also includes distributed databases and middleware including DBAs, DBMS's, tools and operational support. This tower also includes traditional
mainframes running legacy operating systems and associated mainframe database and mainframe middleware systems and services. It includes converged infrastructure with purpose built appliances providing compute storage and network in one box. And
finally, it includes cloud platform-as-a-service, and both Windows and Linux flavors of Infrastructure as a Service.
The Storage tower consists of four distinct tiers of storage service. Tier 1 storage enables mission critical applications and services. Tier 2 storage is for essential, but non mission critical applications and services and data. Tier 3 is for nonessential historical and other information and Tier 4 is for archive, backup, and recovery. This tower also includes public cloud
infrastructure as a service for both normal transactional or other
operational applications and systems and for backup and archival purposes.
The Network tower includes physical and wireless local area networking,
wide area network equipment, labor, and support services, voice resources that support on-premise voice distribution and other specialized network equipment infrastructure and services such as contact center, network security, vpn, and and so on. The Network tower also includes cloud network for public cloud infrastructure as a service
network offerings.
The Communications tower includes voice and data network circuits and associated access facilities and services, as well as voice and data usage based on usage billing.
The Output tower includes central print services, often for customer billing or customer documentation processes as well as centralized host print
processing such as fold stuff, apply to postage, and bundle.
The End User tower includes client compute, physical desktops, portable laptops, thin clients, peripherals and associated software. It includes mobile devices like tablets and smartphones. It includes centralized helpdesk resources that handle end user requests, questions or issues. It also includes local support resources that provide on-site field support. And finally it includes cloud desktop through public cloud as an
infrastructure offerings.
The Application tower includes resources involved with application
development projects. It also includes operations support,
fix, and minor enhancements associated with existing applications.
It includes softer expenditures such as licensing maintenance and support related off-the-shelf software purchases and it includes public cloud software as a service application offerings.
The Delivery tower includes centralized IT operations center resources that
perform tasks such as monitoring and intervention. It includes resources involved with managing and supporting IT related projects. It also includes resources or account managers aligned with the lines of business to understand/communicate their needs and
finally, it includes public cloud centralized service management
operations and monitoring services.
The Security and Compliance tower consists of IT security resources, set policy, establish process, measure compliance, and respond to breaches.
It also consists of compliance resources that set policy, establish controls and measure compliance. It includes IT disaster recovery resources
that set disaster recovery policy, establish process, it includes dedicated
failover facilities and the performance of disaster recovery
testing. And, finally includes public cloud infrastructure as a
service offerings for on-demand disaster recovery services.
The IT Management tower includes IT management and administration resources typically the CIO, senior IT leaders, and administrative support. It also includes enterprise architecture services including business information, and application and technical architecture. It also includes resources involved in IT Finance - performing the planning, budgeting, spend management and so on for IT. And it includes resources
involved in the selection, contract management oversight, and general delivery of services by third-party contractors or vendors.
#3 If fidelity of financial information made it very difficult to align to sub-towers, we up-leveled the category.
Leveraging a third tier, Sub-Tower Element, to enable customers with the supporting financial data to maintain the desired fidelity
Servers, Storage Sub-Towers, Data, Telecom, Output (collapsed Post Processing into Central Print)
Changes in technology have eliminated the ability to map to a category (e.g. auto-tiering storage doesn’t align to Tier 1/Tier 2, VoIP)
Storage Sub-Towers (auto-tiering), Data
Name change and/or clarify meaning and scope of the sub-tower and the appropriate tower alignment
Midrange, all Public Cloud, Workspace/End User Software/Conferencing & AV, Help Desk/IT Service Mgmt, Deskside Support, Business Software