IT: Doing More With Less

Regardless of the economic climate SMBs are always faced with doing more with less due to the constant demands of the marketplace. Most SMBs invest more into their IT than any other area due to the realities that without it, companies loose money and miss out on opportunity. IT Optimization is an approach that can lower operational costs and help SMBs become agile and responsive to business challenges. With ever shrinking budgets ITO has been taking an increasingly dominant role in the way IT departments approach delivering services.

So then, the question is how IT managers, when faced with dramatic resource challenges and ever growing business needs cope?

The goal of reducing complexity should be freeing up precious resources to support and enable growth. Existing IT infrastructure can be optimized and re-envisioned. Typically businesses over purchase technology, create systems and environments with increasing complexity that tend to catch up and bite them over time. Companies find the quickest and expedient way to enhance IT systems, but this piecemeal approach saps resources that can be used to increasing core business efficiencies and drive market innovation. At its best, IT systems should never be a hindrance to management’s ability to make fully informed decisions within a minimum of time.

During the evolution of a company IT departments tend to end up with an over bloated infrastructure. Conventional wisdom dictating that a new server should be purchased for every major application, especially since servers have become more and more affordable. This leads to systems that tend to be vastly under-utilized and have a hard cost to maintain that seems to only grow. Very few companies have the capability or the resources to completely re-do or replace their existing systems. Fortunately, there are solutions out there that can put IT managers on the path to consolidation:

Virtualization – This method greatly reduces the issue of underutilizing hardware by using software to virtually divvy up a physical server into multiple virtual servers. This drastically reduces utility costs, increases the effectiveness of hardware by orders of magnitude, and increases reliability and redundancy.

Cloud Computing – Further building on virtualization, cloud computing promises to make the next quantum leap in on-demand computing. Going from a physical infrastructure to an abstracted cloud platform may be a difficult jump for IT managers but the advantages are tangible. Being able to tap into computing power from a massive array of inter-connected servers, scale on demand and pay as you go. No longer will you be hampered by physical infrastructure, need more CPU resources to handle a spike in traffic, no problem, just increase the amount of resources demanded from the cloud in real time and your off to the races. The same can be said with storage, bandwidth, and memory. Freeing an IT infrastructure from the physical has serious advantages both on the agility of a company and the capital expenditures of hardware purchases that can be jarring.

Eventually, if you have a growing and successful business, IT departments must implement some form of ITO. Streamlining existing processes, enabling agile business response, increasing business intelligence, improving company collaboration, and running lean and smart. Taking a cold eye and looking at your existing infrastructure, and processes may not be an easy task nor will it be done in a near term but any growing SMB must set IT goals that leads to built-in efficiency and yields the tangible results that can be a determining factor between success, and failure.




Danny Kim






WBS Connect