Information technology has continued
to take up a larger share of American
companies’ expenditures. In the early 1980s, IT consumed about 15 percent of
capital expenditures. It grew to nearly 50
percent by the end of the 1990s. It is now
reportedly close to 80 percent. While IT is
extremely important, companies are looking for ways to maximize benefits and
minimize costs.
“The best way to take the IT department
from a cost center to a business enabler is
to optimize the core infrastructure,” says
Chaz Braman, director of Microsoft services at Pomeroy IT Solutions. “This will
provide a competitive advantage along
with revenue growth, profits and customer loyalty. Higher levels of maturity
can result in a savings in IT costs of up to
80 percent.”
Smart Business spoke with Braman
for his insight into core infrastructure
optimization.
What is core infrastructure optimization?
Core infrastructure optimization (core
IO) is a method to analyze your entire
computer system along with what you
expect from it. You want to look at all the
possibilities to employ computer abilities
that are underutilized. When you use your
infrastructure at its optimum level, you
gain a competitive advantage by providing
better customer service. Repetitive operations can be handled automatically to cut
labor costs. Core IO gives a comprehensive, proven and efficient methodology to
help improve your core infrastructure.
What benefits can be expected from core IO?
Core IO is designed to help control IT
costs, improve security and availability,
and increase agility to enable companies
to spend less time and money on maintenance and devote more time to creating
and facilitating new capabilities and services to advance the business. An optimized core infrastructure can lead to
greater business continuity, enhanced
compliance and better, more secure access to network resources. Organizations
can achieve notable improvements in the ability to provide faster, more responsive
IT service and, thus, increase agility.
How is core IO accomplished?
It starts with a comprehensive assessment to help you analyze your core infrastructures and a comparison of your
answers with similar businesses. The
assessment is very holistic and unobtrusive and does not require any software
installation or network scanning. It provides a personalized and private optimization score, a peer comparison, and a value
assessment. The assessment delivers a
comprehensive report that can serve as an
actionable road map and incentive for
optimizing any IT infrastructure and platform. There are four levels of optimization
maturity. Once your level is determined,
the next step is to lay out the road map to
bump up to the next level. Here is where
you stand today, here is where you want
to go and here is how to get there. Your
report also includes a quantifiable value
of improving your core infrastructure,
which is based on IDC and Gartner data of
organizations that have already undergone the process.
What are the four levels?
They are basic, standardized, rationalized/advanced and dynamic. Basic is just
what it says. Constant manual monitoring
and repairs are needed. Standardized
includes some automated systems management capabilities and some automated
identity and access management. The next
level, rationalized/advanced, includes
some virtualization capabilities and proactive security and configuration policies
that enable self-provisioning. The infrastructure achieves its full potential as a
strategic asset for the business and
enables people throughout the enterprise
to do more to advance the business at the
dynamic level.
What are some examples of potential cost
savings?
One area is desktop setup. The road
map can provide methodology to take a
desktop out of the box and hook it into
your system almost instantly. You bypass
all the time it used to take to individually
set up each computer and align it with
your system. You’ll likely gain savings in
another area as well because you probably have everything needed in the software, which you have already purchased.
It is just not all being utilized. For
instance, Microsoft’s Enterprise licensing
agreement usually includes all the tools.
It is just that too many people have not
taken the time or had the inclination to
match the abilities to their needs. The
costs for hardware and software are
going down, yet the costs of managing
and supporting your infrastructure are
increasing. Optimizing your core infrastructure will help you gain full potential
from what you have already paid for. You
can take many steps that are now done
manually and make them automatic, thus
allowing time for other more productive
tasks and increased profitability.
CHAZ BRAMAN is director of Microsoft services at Pomeroy IT Solutions. Reach him at (216) 408-8277 or by e-mail at
[email protected].
