The extent to which businesses can use or manipulate IT infrastructure, operations and management solutions to their advantage depends as much on cost, availability and effectiveness of applications and services as it does on solution providers and the management of the entire sourcing process.

Infrastructure Management (IM) of information technology (IT) relates to management of essential operational components such as equipment, installation, data, policies, processes and human resources to increase the overall efficiency of an organisation.

For a long time IT infrastructure was considered to be hardware and software. At the most, it included a related network if there was one. As such, management of IT infrastructure meant procurement and installation of the necessary hardware and software.