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.