Optimising your IT systems can bring immediate savings and long-term business benefits, if you’re prepared to make the necessary changes
It is highly likely that CIOs continually ask themselves how they can increase IT’s contribution to business growth. Top of mind is “can’t we get more bang for our buck out of our IT?” Companies have invested heavily in IT systems and they want as much of a business return as possible. Measuring the value to the business of a specific IT programme is always tricky, but technology can play a clear role in enhancing business agility and growth. The question is whether the investment is returning as much value to the business as it could. The answer to this is very often ‘no’.
Fortunately, there is a solution – optimisation – that tackles these questions and a number of other issues facing IT departments. As we will see, solving these problems will result in your IT systems delivering greater value to your business. In return, the business may need to make some changes of its own. But first it’s important to understand precisely which issues optimisation is capable of addressing.
What’s the problem?
Most of these issues are a result of the increasing complexity of companies’ IT estates. Too many assets are being used in an inefficient manner giving rise to high costs and inflexibility.
“We’ve seen a growth in the stovepiping of applications over the years,” says Simon Walsh, managing director at Computacenter Services. “People did it because it was easy and because it meant every individual need was self-contained – one application, one server. And even the cost of the infrastructure, for people coming out of the mainframe era, seemed affordable. But what has been overlooked is the cost of managing the large and complex estate that results.”
The problem of complexity is naturally exacerbated if the IT assets are spread over many locations, rather than being consolidated into one or, preferably, two datacentres. Physical consolidation is already on the agenda for a large number of companies, but it’s essential to include optimisation as a key part of this, because even when IT facilities are concentrated in a few locations, stovepiping and other inefficiencies still occur. For example, your systems might simply be too large.
“Companies have bought infrastructure and sized it for the peak load,” explains Colin Bradford, datacentre practice leader at Computacenter. “But few have ever validated those decisions. So the infrastructure within the datacentre is often oversized.”
It’s not unknown to find that servers, especially on the x86 architecture, are being used to no more than 3-7 per cent of their capacity. And 10-15 per cent utilisation is very common. But this wastefulness is far from being the only problem. In such a complex environment, systems management activities such as patching, upgrading and even application roll-out become more difficult, more time-consuming, riskier and more expensive. So do security, backup and other processes that make your company more resilient to accidents and attacks.
An inefficient datacentre also acts as a brake on the business. Walsh cites a couple of real-world examples: “One was a bank that was taking up to a year to design and deploy the infrastructure for each new application or service. In the financial services marketplace, products sometimes have a shelf-life that isn’t a lot greater than that.”
He adds: “We have also been working with a hosting business. It was great at selling capacity to its clients – all good, tier one names. But while the sales teams were being highly successful at winning customers, the company’s internal processes for adding capacity and flexing to meet additional requirements were so slow that they missed deadlines. That was because of a highly rigid infrastructure – one app, one server. So that’s a good example of a company needing greater agility. They’ve now transformed the company by separating the physical infrastructure from the logical – a level of abstraction achieved through utility computing.”
Groaning at the seams
However flexible they might be, many datacentres are groaning at the seams. Companies are frequently faced with the prospect of having to move to larger datacentres – perhaps entirely new premises – because the current ones simply don’t have the rack space or the power supply and cooling capacity to support more servers.
“Simple lack of floorspace or availability of sufficient power has been a major driver for optimisation projects,” says Bradford, “whether it’s simple consolidation or platform changes, or more radical changes in the way IT is fundamentally delivered.”
In addition, excessive power consumption doesn’t just eat up budget – it is increasingly being seen as a green issue, a sensitive area that has driven this to the top of many firms’ agendas. However, it’s highly possible that you don’t actually need more space. What you need is to make current systems work harder.
“The chances are, you may already have more than enough spare capability but you just can’t easily use it or re-use it,” says Walsh. “It isn’t a matter of making more investment in hardware but in getting more out of what you’ve got.”
And it’s not just about the servers themselves. There are opportunities for consolidation of storage, firewalls and other systems, as we see in the Solutions feature on page 14.
Why now?
It would be reasonable to ask why this is an issue now. After all, one presumes that companies regarded the cost of installing these systems as quite reasonable at the time. However, aside from the management costs, which we’ve already touched on, there are other pressures on businesses and their IT departments that make optimisation a timely process.
The sheer pervasiveness of IT is one. Now, every aspect of an organisation’s activities is supported by or reliant on its IT systems. The sheer size of the estate is growing and so is its complexity, with a constantly increasing number of applications and processes. This is putting greater demands on IT services and the quickest response for IT departments often comes with the penalty of greater complexity. A well thought out optimisation will allow new services to be integrated much more quickly without such increases in size and complexity.
Legislative compliance is focusing a lot of manager’s minds at the moment too. Ensuring that data is secure and properly managed, stored, backed-up and available is much harder on distributed or inefficient systems. The same goes when it comes to patching and certifying systems and providing resilience against disasters or business interruption, and those are areas that have implications for legal compliance, system efficiency and business performance.
Every IT professional knows that budget constraints are getting tighter. All IT departments are being asked to do more with less money. With optimisation, the IT department has the opportunity to provide a greater return to the business on its current investment.
“It’s about IT delivering value back to the business,” says Walsh. “There’s a lot of pressure from a governance perspective to ensure that when projects are implemented and when large investments are carried out, there’s a return on investment associated with that.”
Business benefits
It’s clear that a successful optimisation programme can help solve a number of problems. But it goes beyond that, for while optimisation may read like a technical exercise of interest mainly to the IT department, its impact can be felt through a number of significant business benefits, which can include reduced operating costs, greater security and enhanced business agility.
“In my experience, business justification for IT projects tends to fall into three categories: cost reduction; risk mitigation; and innovation,” says Terry Walby, datacentre solutions director at Computacenter. A smart optimisation programme can deliver all three. While reducing the total cost of ownership is often the prime motivation, Walby says, and is the pressure that most organisations face right now, an effective optimisation programme includes mitigation of the risks to continued business operations. It must aim to deliver a more resilient and available architecture less likely to suffer service interruptions or data loss as a result of an outage or disaster.
“By ‘innovation’, what I mean is using technology approaches to achieve something new,” says Walby. An optimised infrastructure in the datacentre can allow an organisation to use IT more effectively to drive the business as well as support it. With an agile, scalable infrastructure, IT can actually create business opportunities and deliver greatly reduced time to value from assets. New products and services can be launched within days, not weeks or months, creating real tangible business value.
When the business is looking to change, which means introducing new applications and functionality, a more strategic, more scalable, more upgradeable platform means that you can implement these changes much faster. “By having an optimised infrastructure, the IT department can speed up that process a great deal,” explains Bradford. “No longer are you waiting for systems to be procured, set-up, tested and signed-off for operational support. You’re ready at the touch of a button. That kind of agility delivers great benefits.”
Managing the change
How do you know when you’ve achieved a return on your optimisation activity? “Most organisations will build a Return On Investment justification for making IT change,” says Walby. “They go through the change but they don’t necessarily return to measure the benefits of that investment – and partly because that’s very difficult to do.”
This is because many of the benefits derived are buried in the accounting practices and methods of the organisation. To measure the effects of an optimised architecture, companies need to provide a greater degree of transparency to their lines of business in terms of how costs are allocated and charged. Unfortunately, few organisations have accounting practices that support that level of granularity. So to get the most out of an optimisation programme, you need to make changes not just to the hardware and software, but to the way IT is delivered and many of the business processes around that.
The business needs to recognise IT as a service provider delivering against a Service Level Agreement and this involves a different mindset, explains Walby. “How do you stop the business from continuing to use the idea that ‘I’ve got an application so I want a server to run it on’? There are two ways. One is to be very directive, and restrict the ability of lines of business to make technology choices – in other words, you say ‘you can’t choose what application and platform you want, you have to adhere to our standards’. The other is to make it cost beneficial, to pass on the savings of the optimised infrastructure to the business user who is going to benefit. That’s great in theory, but for it to work most effectively, business users need to pay for what they use, so that they actually see the benefit. If your organisation can’t use granular usage and chargeback data, there’s little use in providing it, and it won’t drive adoption of new practices.”
Server virtualisation is a good example. Lines of business may be accustomed to thinking of a specific server as ‘theirs’. They may pay a fixed charge for the server, the application, its maintenance and support, or they may pay a fixed allocation of the cost of IT, taken as a business overhead. With virtualisation, physical resources are shared, so this cost can be replaced by a service charge according to various usage metrics. This generally results in significant savings, but if the organisation doesn’t have the right processes that can pass on these savings, then there is no incentive for business users to support the change. And the same goes when it comes to encouraging people to move data from primary to second-tier storage, or from direct-attached storage to networked systems – and so on.
With the service model, lines of business may have to give up a degree of control, and that also won’t sit well unless they get something back. “It can be a local benefit – such as reduced cost for the line of business,” says Walby, “or a benefit that’s recognised centrally within the organisation. In that case, the individual lines of business may not have any choice because it’s going to be the CFO who’s saying ‘you have to do it this way because it’s going to save the corporation money’.”
Computacenter can assist with this change of culture. It has worked with many companies, providing them with commercial frameworks that can help them switch to a service-oriented way of working.
Optimisation, then, has two main components. One is about tactical change, achieving quick wins – which may mean freeing up datacentre space, reducing maintenance costs, or freeing up capability to support more strategic projects. Alongside that, there is, ideally, a long-term plan that defines the way in which you deliver IT services going forward, couched in terms of defined standards of performance.
“With customers who are doing this, we’re seeing a much more mature mindset in the IT department,” says Bradford. “It is about standardisation, about having building blocks that are repeatable, reusable, low-cost to implement and which can easily grow – or shrink.”
The process of building this service infrastructure allows you to understand what you’ve got and how it’s being used. And then you deliver against service levels. It also creates a powerful framework for future development.
As business volumes grow, or you create new products or projects, you are able to build on that framework to provide the necessary resources in either a strategic fashion or a tactical fashion.
“Optimisation is not just about the technology,” says Bradford. “It’s about tools and processes, and it’s about changing the culture of the people who build the infrastructure services and the people who are delivering on it.”
