Assessment and Planning

A Virtualization and Security assessment engagement is comprised of two distinct components:

• Business process assessment
• Technical/infrastructure assessment

The business process assessment -- often referred to as the "soft side" of the assessment -- follows our Service Portfolio Management Assessment and Planning methodology. Generally, this implementation approach focuses on developing the management system infrastructure framework and establishing enterprise alignment in the early phases. Followed by building formalized processes on top of that foundation, providing the platform for continuous performance improvement.

In parallel with the business process assessment, a Virtualization and Security assessment requires a detailed technical evaluation -- the "hard side" -- of the existing network, server, and application infrastructures. Whether the desire is to reallocate existing hardware to the virtualization effort or to employ a going-forward hardware replacement strategy, the technical assessment is required to ensure that the corporate IT infrastructure is optimized for the virtual world.

The technical assessment follows an iterative approach to collecting and documenting the existing enterprise:

The final step in the technical assessment is the prototyping/testing of all custom (non-COTS) applications in a virtualized environment.

Once the business process assessment and the technical/infrastructure assessment components are completed, they are then combined to create a single Virtualization and Security Architecture and Implementation Roadmap.

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