IT decision makers (ITDMs) face several challenges managing IT capacity and cost in today’s increasingly complex IT service and operations management (ITSM/ITOM) environments. In fact, 86 percent readily admit in a recent IDG survey that they find it “very challenging” or “extremely challenging” to optimize their IT resources to adequately meet changing business demands. Top challenges include:
- An inability to scale IT services as needed
- Difficulty predicting capacity requirements
- Lack of visibility into resource usage and cost
- Managing the growing infrastructure complexity of on-premises and cloud-based capacity and cost management solutions
- Organizational disruption due to new ways of doing business, i.e., the surge of remote workers due to the pandemic
- Managing the transition to modern technologies—Kubernetes, containers, Pods and so on—from legacy technologies
These difficulties become even more concerning when one considers the continued emphasis on “doing more with less” due to shrinking ITSM/ITOM budgets. Additional complications include managing the exponentially growing volume of data and number of applications, device types, and users—along with user expectations.
So, how are leading IT decision makers finding a balance and meeting those emerging requirements while maximizing the efficiency of expensive resources?
The short answer is they are using software solutions that increase the visibility of resources across the enterprise—physical, virtual, container, Pods, Kubernetes, and cloud infrastructure—to help identify the resources they have and the dependencies and relationships between them. Greater visibility also provides comprehensive views into how changing business requirements impact the IT resources needed to maintain service levels, capacity requirements, budgets, and costs.
With today’s discovery and optimization tools, IT decision makers can gain deeper insight into resource demand and usage. Modern discovery and optimization tools also help them better predict, plan, deploy, and right-size IT resources leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) recommendations to accurately align IT resources with emerging business requirements.
According to the IDG survey, ITDMs can yield a number of benefits, including:
- A reduction in budget overruns by leveraging AI- and ML-driven analytics for resource and cost optimization
- Reduced slowdowns, service outages, and risk, with a deeper understanding of the overall health of business services, through comprehensive views and predictive saturation forecasting
- Increased alignment of resources with business requirements using advanced analytics and forecasts for actionable insights that help ensure service quality
- Improved accuracy when determining the impact of legacy workload migrations to the cloud, and placement of containerized workloads using “what if” simulations
To learn more about efficient resource, capacity, and cost management in today’s complex IT environments, download the e-book, “Service Assurance and Optimization with AIOps.”
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