Many midsize businesses are refreshing aging infrastructure to improve performance, strengthen security, control costs, and support future growth. Modern infrastructure not only supports today's business-critical workloads but also prepares organizations for future AI opportunities.
Unlike the configurations of eras gone by, however, modern computing infrastructure appropriate to run the most aggressive AI workloads for many years, and into the future, is highly specialized, takes advantage of specific innovations like those in the Intel® Xeon® 6 processors, and must incorporate key aspects such as power efficiency and long-term resilience. With that in mind, here are seven things that businesses must consider before embarking on their next infrastructure refresh.
1. Scalability
One of the most critical considerations for a midsize business is the ability to scale as business needs evolve. Whether you're supporting virtualization, databases, collaboration tools, analytics initiatives, or exploring new AI use cases, your infrastructure should be able to grow without introducing unnecessary complexity. As workloads expand, organizations need a flexible foundation that can support both current business requirements and future AI opportunities.
2. Security
Modern infrastructure should build in security from the start, helping medium businesses protect critical systems and data while reducing disruption when incidents occur. Given it's a matter of when, not if, you'll need infrastructure that makes sure any cyber incidents will also be contained and unlikely to disrupt operations. There's also the question of ransomware, with businesses relying on hard-to-manage backups that may often sit on the same network and are easy to corrupt.
That means looking beyond prevention to recovery readiness, with built-in protections, immutable backups, isolated recovery environments, and streamlined workflows that help restore operations quickly.
Dell PowerEdge servers with Intel Xeon 6 processors provide built-in security by design, while Dell storage and cyber resilience solutions help extend that protection across the environment — strengthening cyber resilience, containing threats, and speeding recovery with less operational complexity for IT teams.
3. Future-proofing
When refreshing your IT infrastructure it's important to consider not just the near-term but the next five-to-seven years minimum. As workloads evolve and data volumes grow, organizations need infrastructure that can support current business applications, new digital initiatives, and emerging AI use cases without requiring frequent or disruptive upgrades.
That means thinking about the physical hardware at the heart of it and whether the components and their arrangement is suitable for your future needs, but also whether your partner has simple and stress-free refresh and upgrade schemes so your infrastructure can remain modern through the years ahead. Future-proofing also means investing in platforms that can consolidate more workloads onto fewer systems, helping reduce infrastructure sprawl while improving efficiency and simplifying management. This can help midsize businesses control costs, maximize resources, and scale more confidently as business needs evolve.
From the outset, however, hardware like Dell PowerEdge R-Series infrastructure with Intel Xeon 6 processors provide a flexible foundation for future growth. Features such as PCIe 5.0 compatibility, CXL 2.0 support, and DDR5 and MRDIMM memory scalability help ensure organizations can support evolving workload demands, including AI, analytics, virtualization, and other business-critical applications as requirements change over time.
4. Ease of deployment
The easier infrastructure is to deploy, manage, and maintain, the easier it becomes for midsize businesses to modernize without overwhelming already-busy IT teams. Since many organizations operate with lean IT staffs responsible for a broad range of priorities, simplifying deployment can reduce risk, accelerate time to value, and minimize disruption during a refresh. Whether you're installing new infrastructure or upgrading existing hardware, many midsize organizations lack dedicated teams focused solely on large-scale modernization projects. Choosing solutions that simplify deployment and ongoing management can help IT teams spend less time on infrastructure administration and more time supporting strategic business initiatives.
Dell's modern infrastructure approach is designed to help midsize businesses simplify deployment and day-to-day operations. Dell PowerEdge servers with Intel Xeon 6 processors provide a standardized foundation that is easy to deploy, manage, and scale, helping IT teams reduce administrative overhead while maintaining performance and security. ProSupport and ProDeploy step in here to provide expert setup, optimization, and proactive troubleshooting. This offloads a lot of the complexity that comes with the refresh, while allowing your staff to allocate their attention elsewhere during the refresh process.
5. Power capacity and efficiency
As you embark on a hardware refresh, you should consider how efficient the new infrastructure you're installing might be. AI workloads demand a huge amount of power, which will translate to high energy and maintenance costs. But, thankfully, modern systems like the Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers are built to match that growing demand as it rises. The hardware combines with Intel Xeon processor technology to deliver a modern level of power efficiency that far exceeds previous generations of this technology. Modern platforms can also help organizations consolidate more workloads onto fewer servers, reducing infrastructure sprawl while lowering power consumption, cooling requirements, rack space, and day-to-day management overhead.
For example, improved performance per watt and higher compute density can help organizations run more workloads on fewer systems, translating into lower power and cooling requirements, reduced operational costs, and more efficient use of infrastructure resources. Partnering with Dell also provides a path for ongoing modernization, helping organizations take advantage of future improvements in performance and efficiency while maintaining a scalable infrastructure foundation aligned to business growth.
6. Cost control
Costs are one of the most important factors, not just in terms of keeping costs down but keeping them predictable and manageable over longer periods of time and aligned to long-term business growth. When considering your next IT infrastructure refresh, you must balance the initial up-front costs with the long-term operating costs. The right infrastructure strategy should help control expenses today while providing the flexibility to scale as business needs evolve.
By using infrastructure from Dell with Intel technology, you can keep your costs predictable by not only benefiting from higher power efficiency versus legacy systems, but from a level of flexibility that lets you incrementally scale up and grow the number of workloads you run to support growth within tight budgets. Dell also deploys standardized and cost-effective programs to manage day-to-day operations. Dell research shows that Dell PowerProtect systems could lead to a cost of ownership between 38% and 61% lower over a three-year timeframe, versus industry alternatives.
7. Cyber resilience and disaster recovery
When refreshing your infrastructure, it's important to plan not only for growth and performance, but also for business continuity. Power outages, cyberattacks, hardware failures, and other disruptions can impact operations, making resilience and recovery key considerations in any modernization strategy.
Many midsize businesses still rely on basic backups or loosely defined disaster recovery plans that may not provide the speed, security, or confidence needed during a major disruption. As data volumes grow and organizations adopt new digital and AI-driven workloads, recovery strategies must evolve as well.
Effective cyber resilience includes not only protecting data, but ensuring clean copies can be recovered quickly to minimize business disruption after an incident. Some providers, like Dell, help midsize businesses implement practical, cost-effective cyber resilience and disaster recovery strategies that leverage capabilities such as immutable backups, isolated recovery environments, and streamlined recovery workflows to help reduce disruption and restore operations quickly.