An infrastructure architect is a specialist architect role heavily focused on enterprise IT infrastructure design, security, and data center operation. They work closely with solution architects to make sure that the organization's infrastructure strategy is aligned with its overall business requirements, and they plan an appropriate resource capacity to fulfill this need by analyzing system requirements and the existing environment. They help reduce capital expenditure that could be utilized for operational spending to increase organizational efficiency and ROI.
The infrastructure architect is the backbone of the organization since they define and plan overall IT resources, from storage servers to individual workspaces. The infrastructure architect creates detailed plans for procuring and setting up IT infrastructures. They define software standards, software patching, and software update plan systems across an organization. The infrastructure architect handles infrastructure security and makes sure all environments are protected from unwanted virus attacks. They also plan for disaster recovery and system backups to make sure business operations are always running.
In most e-commerce businesses, infrastructure architect jobs become challenging as they need to plan for the peak season such as Thanksgiving in USA, Boxing Day in Canada and UK, Diwali in India and so on, when most consumers start shopping. They need to prepare enough server and storage capacity to accommodate the peak season, whose workload may be 10 times higher than normal, thus increasing the cost. A system will be sitting idle for most of the year, outside of the peak season. They need to plan for cost optimization and better user experience at the same time, which is another reason they may use the cloud to fulfill additional capacity and scale on-demand to reduce the cost. They need to ensure that systems are occupied while supporting the growth of the new expertise.
Overall, an infrastructure architect needs to have a good understanding of data center operation and the components involved, such as heating, cooling, security, racking and stacking, server, storage, backup, software installation and patching, load balancers, and virtualization.