Fighting Back In 2010 With A ‘Just Enough’ Model

Equally, smaller businesses with a mind to expansion would do well to implement a system that captures all components of the IT infrastructure and ensure that its available to the whole organisation.

Accurate data that is easily accessible by all members of the IT organisation makes for a stronger and more capable team.  Not only does it ease bringing on new team members and decrease risk (by reducing ‘unknown’ factors), but it also allows IT managers to more accurately forecast costs and plan resources accordingly.

Self Improvement – The Silver Lining:

Whether your strategy for 2010 is based on a traditional IT model or includes ‘the cloud’, the starting position should be the same.  Simply put: define what you have, align it with your IT business needs, and the differences will indicate your area for investment.  Added to this, the knowledge of what the current systems are actually doing (how poorly utilised they are) will arm you with the ability to assess whether you can load them more heavily to meet those needs, or realign resources to utilise them better.  This is one of the well known core benefits of virtualising resources.

Aside from buying new hardware to fulfil the differences between current capabilities and requirements, another consideration could be ‘the cloud’ as a means to fill these differences.  The premise of the concept is simple – by utilising high bandwidth technologies, virtualisation, and advanced supply/provision models, cloud providers are able to supply organisations with fluid scalability of infrastructure resources, utility computing services, ubiquitous network access and location independence.

Understanding your abilities, defining your requirements and moving away from a ‘just in case’ to a ‘just enough’ model for IT provision may provide the agility needed to fight to win in 2010.