As more businesses outsource their information technology functions, service providers are beset with many challenges including security, business continuity, performance, agility, cost, etc. Service providers need logical and physical infrastructures that meet today’s challenges, but they also need to refresh their technology and look to the future. This project presents an analysis of a typical information technology service provider for small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) that are considering options for redesigning their infrastructure. The systems analysis includes network and server infrastructure analyses of the current IT infrastructure. An analysis of the benefits and concerns of the current infrastructure is discussed. Three concepts for potential future infrastructure designs are presented, along with their evaluation from the Information Technology Experts. The first concept is to upgrade the current architecture with no architectural changes, the second concept is to design an architecture oriented to Flexibility & Manageability and final concept is to design an architecture oriented to Business Continuity, Security and High Availability. From interaction with Information Technology (IT) experts, High Availability has been identified as the 4th concept in designing the future IT infrastructures. The prototype architectures are designed at ultimate level of business objectives which helps the SMBs to choose the architecture changes as necessary and lead IT experts to place their current architecture and the direction they are moving in future. Experts showed interests to move away from conventional architectures to cloud based architectures and they seem to be very comfortable in keeping data and services off-premises.

Recommended Citation: Krishnappa D., Kline D., Morago B., Sibona C., (2017). Systems Analysis and Design of Information Technology Architectures for Small to Medium Businesses. UNCW MS CSIS Proceedings. V. 11 , N. 2 .