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Best IT Strategies for 2009
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As we are bombarded with ever gloomier economic forecasts for 2009 and beyond, all companies are looking at their budgets very closely, and IT costs are under scrutiny. At the same time, the lessons of Hurricane Ike are also resonating. Now more than ever it is important to look at long term strategies for your IT systems. Companies cannot afford to be surprised by unpredicted expenses and productivity-sapping downtime. By adopting the key strategies in the list below, the midmarket CIO can be well prepared for the challenges to come.
Number 1: Build Agility Through Virtualization
At any given time in a conventional server room or data center, several servers are in need of upgrade. Older and obsolete servers are difficult and expensive to keep running. Some applications require dedicated servers but waste most of the processing power available. Every server draws power, requires cooling, and uses space.
Virtualization allows the creation of a server and storage pool, of sorts. One powerful hardware server and one storage system can be the host for up to ten or more server "virtual machines". That's ten virtual servers running on one machine. Each virtual server is given a share of the total processing power of the host, a share of its memory, and a share of its storage. When running, the virtual server is completely isolated from the other virtual servers running on the same host. This means if a server crashes it cannot affect the operation of any of the other virtual servers.
This doesn't even touch on the powerful ability to start, stop, and move virtual servers without even touching the hardware. Virtualization should be the foundation of your cost containment and high availability strategy by allowing you to:
- Upgrade all of your servers at once to hardware that will last you through the lean years to come
- Add new virtual servers without buying new server hardware
- Cut the costs of power used for running and cooling your servers
- Reduce the cost of space necessary to house your servers
- Reduce the time and expense needed to manage the servers and to support the server hardware
- Increase productivity and uptime through greater reliability
- Get full use of your hardware investment
As a long term strategic change in how you work with your server resources, virtualization is the number one best thing you can do for your company. The savings are immediate and last for years.
Number 2: Manage Vendor Relationships for Greatest Value
Along with salaries and other support costs, recurring circuit and other service costs are the biggest IT expenses on the income statement. Even in a competitive market there are things a company can do to trim these recurring costs, and sometimes significantly. Circuit agreement rates that were negotiated in the past need to be revisited to take advantage of the reductions in bandwidth costs that have occurred over the past few years. Certainly if your agreements have expired and you are on a month-to-month basis it is time to contact your vendor and one or two competitors to get the best pricing available.
Even if you are in an active agreement it is usually possible to renegotiate for lower monthly recurring charges in exchange for committing to extending the term of your agreement. You will get the best rates on longer term agreements, of course, and if rates continue to drop you can always try to extend your term again for an even lower rate.
With your product and services vendors, see what expertise you can leverage to get higher value. Good vendors will want to make sure you are getting exactly what you need. Good services vendors can also provide advice based on their exposure to many different similar challenges at different companies, allowing you to tap into a wealth of experience. In this way you can save the cost of hiring internal staff to perform these advisory roles.
Number 3: Implement a Mobility Strategy for 24/7 Productivity and for Disaster Survival
Doing an internal data center justice is a very expensive proposition, as many companies learned during the extensive power outages of Hurricane Ike. Even after building the best possible protection for a data center in your building, and with the best generator-backed uninterruptible power systems, an office that is without power and Internet connections is down, to both the company and its customers.
Putting your critical servers or replicated copies of those servers in a commercial data center means that even in a total loss of your offices your company can continue to be open for business. You are joining a pool of companies in sharing the cost of these expensive facilities. But do your research and choose data centers carefully. During Ike some of the largest commercial data centers lost power themselves and went down hard. Ask for a report on their total uptime, especially in September of 2008.
With fully functioning copies of your servers in a reliable commercial data center facility, you can achieve a fully mobile workforce model. In a mobile model, anywhere your people have an Internet connection they can work just as if they are in the office. With full access to e-mail, business-critical applications, shared files, and even voice communications, there is no interruption in business as usual in the worst disasters. What's more, with this model, a company can work collaboratively from anywhere at anytime.
Collaboration should be considered a critical design element going forward. As your mobile workforce has access to all of the same applications and data, the company can now create work teams that are in different locations and still achieve full productivity. This ability to better leverage your human resources can help you maintain productivity even with a smaller workforce.
Number 4: Create Accountability with Workflow Automation Systems
Your entire IT support team, including both internal staff and outside contractors, can achieve better results if the right tools are put in place to track incidents and task completion. Workflow automation will include a help desk incident system that can report on metrics such as problem resolution times, number of open incidents, and user feedback and satisfaction. It will include procedures for documenting system changes and designs, so that staff changes do not mean loss of critical knowledge.
As a side benefit, good systems can automate management functions that can help you to create a culture of accountability and team building.
Number 5: Consolidate Your Workforce
The final strategy for 2009 and beyond is empowered by the execution of the first four. Virtualization reduces support needs, and outsourcing physical maintenance of a data center does the same. Better use of free vendor resources reduces the need for research and planning work done by internal staff. A mobile IT support staff with adequate proactive monitoring tools and good workflow tools can achieve better results more easily. Lowered support needs mean lowered IT staffing needs, both internal and outsourced.
What most companies will find is that either they need a smaller IT staff, or more likely that they finally have IT support available to maintain the most important aspect of their IT system: making sure users have fast and reliable access to their applications. Internal IT staff is always going to be the most familiar with the company, its users, and the critical applications. In a reliable and optimized information system, an internal staff focused around application delivery will generate the most visible on-going benefits to the users and increase the perceived value of the team.
An Uncertain Future
So far, a strong energy economy has protected Houston-area businesses from the full impact of the mortgage, banking, and credit crises. The current drop prices of crude oil and at the gas pump may mean that this will be changing soon, and it is critical to prepare.
Many companies are taking this as the best time to invest in protection for the coming months. With strong 2008 earnings and the ability to write off 100% of their IT investments this year, we are seeing a trend of companies building low cost, low maintenance IT systems. The smartest companies will follow suit.
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