A Cost-Oriented Approach for the Design of IT Architectures

Multiple combinations of hardware and network components can be selected to design an information technology (IT) infrastructure that satisfies organizational requirements. The professional criterion to deal with these degrees of freedom is cost minimization. However, a scientific approach has been rarely applied to cost minimization and a rigorous verification of professional design guidelines is still lacking. The methodological contribution of this paper is the representation of complex infrastructural design issues as a single cost-minimization problem. The approach to cost-minimization is empirically verified with a database of costs that has also been built as part of this research. The paper shows how an overall cost-minimization approach can provide significant cost reductions and indicates that infrastructural design rules previously identified by the professional literature can lead to sub-optimal solutions.