Description

This curriculum spans the breadth of infrastructure management practices required to align, govern, and optimize shared technology resources across a service portfolio, comparable in scope to a multi-workshop operational transformation program for large-scale IT organizations.

Module 1: Strategic Alignment of Infrastructure with Service Portfolios

Conducting service dependency mapping to identify critical infrastructure components supporting high-impact business services.
Establishing service-level objectives (SLOs) for infrastructure based on business-criticality tiers defined in the service portfolio.
Aligning infrastructure refresh cycles with service lifecycle phases (e.g., retirement, growth) to avoid over-provisioning or under-capacity.
Defining ownership boundaries between infrastructure teams and service owners during service onboarding into the portfolio.
Integrating infrastructure constraints into service design approvals to prevent non-viable service commitments.
Developing a scoring model to prioritize infrastructure investments based on service revenue contribution and operational risk.

Module 2: Infrastructure Capacity and Demand Management Integration

Implementing telemetry pipelines from infrastructure monitoring tools into service demand forecasting models.
Setting thresholds for auto-scaling groups based on projected service usage patterns and SLA requirements.
Managing contention between shared infrastructure resources across multiple services during peak demand periods.
Allocating reserved capacity for regulated or compliance-bound services with fixed infrastructure requirements.
Reconciling actual infrastructure utilization against service-level capacity plans during quarterly portfolio reviews.
Enforcing chargeback or showback mechanisms to influence service teams’ infrastructure consumption behaviors.

Module 3: Resilience and Availability Planning Across Services

Designing infrastructure redundancy levels (e.g., multi-AZ, geo-redundancy) according to service recovery time objectives (RTOs).
Coordinating failover testing schedules across interdependent services to minimize business disruption.
Documenting infrastructure dependencies in runbooks accessible to service operations teams during incident response.
Balancing cost of high-availability configurations against the financial impact of service downtime.
Enforcing infrastructure standardization to reduce configuration drift that undermines resilience claims.
Validating backup integrity and restore procedures for databases supporting mission-critical services annually.

Module 4: Change and Configuration Governance

Requiring impact assessments for infrastructure changes that affect multiple services in the portfolio.
Enforcing change freeze periods aligned with peak business cycles for key services (e.g., retail holiday season).
Integrating CMDB updates into deployment pipelines to maintain accurate service-infrastructural configuration records.
Approving emergency changes through a time-bound review process while preserving audit trails.
Automating drift detection on production infrastructure to enforce configuration baselines defined per service.
Coordinating change advisory board (CAB) meetings with service owners to prioritize infrastructure change windows.

Module 5: Cost Management and Resource Optimization

Allocating infrastructure costs to services using usage-based metrics (e.g., vCPU-hours, storage GB-month).
Identifying underutilized infrastructure instances for decommissioning during service rationalization initiatives.
Applying reserved instance purchasing strategies based on long-term service demand projections.
Setting budget alerts tied to service-level cost centers to trigger infrastructure optimization reviews.
Comparing TCO of on-premises vs. cloud-hosted infrastructure for specific service workloads.
Implementing tagging policies to ensure accurate attribution of cloud spend to service portfolios.

Module 6: Security and Compliance Integration

Embedding infrastructure security baselines (e.g., CIS benchmarks) into service onboarding checklists.
Mapping infrastructure controls to regulatory requirements (e.g., PCI, HIPAA) applicable to specific services.
Conducting infrastructure vulnerability scans on a schedule aligned with service release cycles.
Restricting administrative access to infrastructure based on service ownership and least privilege.
Generating audit reports that correlate infrastructure configurations with service compliance obligations.
Responding to infrastructure-related findings in third-party audits with remediation plans tied to service timelines.

Module 7: Performance Monitoring and Service Feedback Loops

Defining infrastructure KPIs (e.g., latency, error rates) that directly inform service health dashboards.
Correlating infrastructure incidents with service degradation events in post-mortem analyses.
Setting up alerting rules that trigger only when infrastructure issues impact service-level metrics.
Integrating infrastructure telemetry into service reliability reports for executive review.
Adjusting monitoring granularity based on service criticality and user impact thresholds.
Using infrastructure performance trends to influence service capacity planning and architecture changes.

Module 8: Lifecycle Management and Technology Rationalization

Establishing end-of-life (EOL) policies for infrastructure platforms based on vendor support timelines.
Coordinating infrastructure migration projects with service deprecation or modernization schedules.
Assessing technical debt in shared infrastructure components used across multiple services.
Retiring legacy infrastructure only after confirming all dependent services have been migrated.
Standardizing on a reduced set of infrastructure technologies to lower operational complexity across the portfolio.
Documenting migration playbooks for recurring infrastructure upgrade scenarios (e.g., OS patching at scale).