Uncovering the ROI of virtualisation

Companies jumped on the bandwagon and did see the benefits of virtualising servers and applications, but it didn’t return value to the business except as cost avoidance for the current year.  

Obviously something had changed in the virtual world. What headaches are the IT team facing that have financial impact on the business? 

Organisations were not receiving the value for money that they had expected when virtualising. Is managing virtual servers less costly than physical servers?  

Unfortunately there is no one answer; individuals need to consider their own business needs. The important consideration is that applications and servers need proper management, whether they are virtual or physical.  

Management includes a variety of components including; OS patching, application updates, backup, restore, archive, storage expansion, memory expansion, CPU expansion and issues around fire-fighting. These tasks require people, time and money, regardless of their virtualisation status. 

To realise ROI the manpower, time and money need to be measured up front and carefully planned for. Not only as an improvement in service level but as a cost that is returned to the business.

It is important to ask ourselves if everyone’s expectations for virtualisation were realistic. Only projects that take into account the rest of the IT infrastructure will effectively deliver ROI. And remember first and foremost that assumption is the mother of all problems.

ROI can most clearly be seen and measured if businesses follow a clear IT Service Management model. Both this and other ways that businesses can effectively assess their preparedness for virtualisation, prior to implementation, will be discussed in further posts.

Fewer and fewer companies will simply continue to spend money in IT, unless they can sufficiently prove that the spend will not just improve or maintain service, but actually deliver value and cost savings back to the budget.

Andrew McCreath is an Engagement Partner at GlassHouse Technologies. GHT is a global provider of IT infrastructure services enabling organisations to consolidate, virtualise and manage their IT environments.