Managing IT for a Growing Business

You already know from experience that IT infrastructure plays a critical role in your company’s ability to compete and grow. Poorly planned infrastructure and outages can seriously hinder that growth, while a robust IT infrastructure will enable it. As an IT leader in a midsize company, you are responsible for every aspect of infrastructure management, including managing core business systems and planning for scaling up and out to handle increased business volumes, all while protecting and optimizing the capabilities you have today.

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of all this is that scaling part. It’s hard enough to get agreement on just what level of IT capability constitutes rightsized for your business today. How do you adjust and revise that answer when your business is growing, changing, and morphing all the time?

Do you wait until there is a big change in requirements to reassess? Or do you try to stay just ahead of the curve, maintaining some limited amount of excess capacity and capability to handle tomorrow’s needs? If the latter, how much is enough and how do you justify investments that are over-and-above immediate needs, when IT budgets are set in stone and resources are finite?

Of course, you could shift to a more cloud-based stance. But whether you move to a cloud-first strategy or go step-wise with a hybrid approach, the underlying allocation and expense-control problems still exist.

Achieving that elusive rightsized balance is tricky. Maintaining it is just plain hard, given all the factors working against you.

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Capacity Management for SMBs: Managing IT for a Growing Business

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Capacity Management for SMBs: Managing IT for a Growing Business

The Midsize Business IT Crunch

The IT support required to run a midsize business is nearly as extensive as that needed by large enterprises. The very definition of core business applications is driven by the basic requirement of being online. The email, marketing and sales automation systems, finance and accounting suites, partner portals, teleconferencing systems, and the like that keep your business running, are all online.

So, too, are the applications that become the face of the company to your customers. eCommerce functions, self-service account access, order transaction times, and many other customer-facing applications and processes heavily influence whether you successfully acquire new customers and keep them loyal over time. You also face the very same IT security threats as giant, global businesses. Your networks and security solutions must be rock solid, including secure https transaction pages, malware protection, internal permissioning and authentication, and more.

Yet the reality is that IT leaders in midsize firms just do not have the level of resources, in terms of people or budgets, as their bigger competitors. To handle everything, you have to find ways to squeeze every last bit of capability out of your current systems. And to make any new or expanded investment, nothing less than a compelling, totally documented business case will ever be approved.

Surviving – if not thriving – in this environment is what capacity management is all about: planning, monitoring, analyzing and managing your infrastructure utilization to meet current and future business requirements in a cost-effective manner.

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Capacity Management for SMBs: Managing IT for a Growing Business

Capacity Management Breakout: Fundamental Functions

An automated capacity management system continuously monitors server, application and network resources and provides detailed, actionable visibility into how all your IT resources are being utilized.

Data is continuously collected from all systems and sources and stored in a centralized, consolidated database, often referred to as a Capacity Management Information System (CMIS). Using the system’s UI, you can then view, analyze and report on the collected data including:

• Drilling down to identify root cause of system problems

• Conducting regular system assessments

• Documenting normal patterns of utilization, against which you can assess current trends and apparent anomalies

• Establishing and monitoring for incident threshold values and setting up alerts to ensure timely response

In addition, the same CMIS data also enables trendline modeling of capacity data for near term operational planning. Looking further ahead, the impacts of proposed or potential changes to your infrastructure can be modeled using the CMIS, including things like adding a new application or assessing the impacts of providing a new or expanded product line or service.

Major changes to infrastructure and data can also be modeled, such as migrating applications or servers to the cloud, or consolidating physical systems into a virtualized environment. In addition, disaster recovery planning can be improved by modeling scenarios for unplanned outages of critical systems in order to anticipate the practical impacts so that response procedures and work-arounds can be developed in advance, not under crisis conditions.

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Capacity Management for SMBs: Managing IT for a Growing Business

Making the Case for a Capacity Management Solution at Midsized Organizations

While implementing a capacity management solution may at first seem like an unaffordable nice-to-have that is out of scale for a midsize business like yours, the reality is that automated capacity management capabilities are critical to your business and add significant value by amping up your ability to compete. Some key advantages include:

• Cost Containment Through Clear Visibility into Resource Utilization

Both operating expenses (OpEx) and capital investment expenditures (CapEx) are more easily and effectively controlled when you have continuous visibility into overall utilization and normal vs. abnormal variations in processing loads and response times. Just looking at an ad hoc report based upon a snapshot of the overall trend in processing volumes does not tell the whole story.

Depending on how often data is collected and summarized, it is easy to overlook the range of variance that is happening. In other words, a very dynamic or “lumpy” curve can be misinterpreted if viewed as a general trend, when in fact capacity limits could be hit far sooner than the general trendline would indicate, especially if the range of variance is increasing over time.

Such problems are much more easily recognized if you have the ability to analyze more granular, continuously collected processing and system performance data from your CMIS, rather than relying on manually collected snapshots of month-end processing totals after the fact.

Also, keep in mind that using cloud infrastructure is not a panacea. The ease of adding capacity on demand makes it tempting to throw money at a processing problem rather than taking the time to research the root cause. The ability to do proper analysis quickly and accurately, leveraging detailed data from your CMIS, can prevent unnecessary capacity expenditures from being repeated month after month.

To read more on this topic, read the eBook Controlling Cloud Costs with Capacity Management.

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Capacity Management for SMBs: Managing IT for a Growing Business

• Real-Time Alerts for Potential Downtime Incidents

Given the pace of growth and change within your infrastructure and applications, new problems can crop up at any time. You need to be constantly vigilant if you are going to catch an unexpected bump in contention for system resources before it results in a downtime incident. Manual capacity management processes and tools just can’t provide the real-time or even near real-time monitoring and notification that is possible with an automated capacity management system.

The hard cash costs of missing the signals and suffering a downtime incident will, of course, vary by the criticality of the systems to financial flows. An email system failure will probably not hit the bottom line the same way that an eCommerce transaction processing system failure will. But, even so, the soft costs of redirected staff labor time to resolve either issue, and the negative impact on reputation (both externally and within your company) need to be considered as well.

• Detailed and Defensible Managerial Reporting, Across Departments and Functions

Traditionally, the data related to infrastructure and capacity was only distributed to the IT staff. They analyzed and understood it from their perspective. However, we have moved into a world where other departments need to understand this information and its impact on their aspect of the business. This is particularly true in the case of IT chargebacks, where the business leaders need to make trade-offs when setting budgets. Gaining their understanding and buy-in regarding capacity-related issues is critical to their success, and yours.

You need to be able to generate reports that can be easily understood and clearly communicate the risks and impacts on their success. For example, it is a sure bet that the sales leadership will be very interested in capacity issues impacting the CRM system. Being able to explain the issue from their perspective is critical to acceptance. To achieve that, you need to be able to tell a story, backed up by details and facts. Context is important for this.

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Capacity Management for SMBs: Managing IT for a Growing Business

Example 1: Recent spikes in utilization at 11 p.m. on a Saturday may be expected on a customer data backup server but is odd for the CRM system’s outbound email system. What is happening? Did Sales make a process change? Do we need to adjust resources and perhaps reschedule some batch processing jobs?

Example 2: Center Cluster Utilization, which includes the CRM systems, is fine right now, but 10 new VM builds are due in the next two weeks for an HR expansion. Can we meet to review exactly how the CRM systems are provisioned? Can we safely make any adjustments?

A fully featured capacity management system enables you to quickly and easily generate this kind of highly focused, customized reporting, based upon comprehensive, provable analysis.

Efficiency and Scalability Are Critical

One of the classic mistakes in any area of planning is short-term thinking. A cheap and expedient solution to today’s problem can leave you in a worse position in the future. This is especially true for capacity management and planning. Yes, it may be possible to use basic tools like ad hoc queries, spreadsheets and charting tools to get at least a general view of your IT capacity and trends, but as your business grows, scaling up these methods becomes impossible.

Think of it this way: Once you provide your business unit leaders with just a few formal reports and a little information on the capacity issues relevant to them, it’s a near certainty that they will soon have more questions, more customized reports they could use, and greater frustration if any incidents are missed.

The problem is that if your capacity management and planning are being handled manually, you won’t be able to scale up with the business. Specifically, you should be wary of any capacity management processes or tools that are overly labor-intensive or inherently inadequate relative to the volume, scale, complexity or criticality of the systems you need to manage. Neither staff with the right skill sets to handle capacity management, nor the hours they have available, can ever be scaled up as quickly as the pace of your business demands.

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Capacity Management for SMBs: Managing IT for a Growing Business

It is essential to implement a capacity management solution today that will be ready and able to handle future workloads and computing environments without costly and complex upgrades or deep, customized modifications to code.

To read more on this topic, read the eBook Overcoming the Pitfalls of Manual Capacity Management Processes.

What to Look for in a Capacity Management Solution

For midsize businesses, the value of implementing a capacity management solution is tremendously positive. The immediate benefits include greater operational efficiencies and more informed and responsive problem resolution. But you also get recurring, measurable ROI every time you consider making any additions or adjustments to your infrastructure, as part of your constant efforts to keep it all rightsized.

But, where to begin? Just a quick glance at your meeting calendar confirms you are strapped for time. How can you take on a big capacity management research project? Well, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Start by informally reviewing your IT operations to identify and prioritize the capacity management capabilities that are most needed in your organization. Which would provide the quickest ROI and which would be most valuable in the near future?

Here is a list to help you sort out your options and priorities.

• Continuous, fully automated multi-platform performance and capacity data collection, inclusive of all virtual and cloud-based systems

Automated data collection enables your organization to implement effective cross-platform capacity management by identifying over and under-utilized and idle IT infrastructure resources, whether on-premises or in the cloud.

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Capacity Management for SMBs: Managing IT for a Growing Business

• Full integration of all data types and formats into one unified logical CMIS database

You should be able to easily import any time series component, service or business data, across all operating systems, networks, storage systems, etc., enabling a single capacity view across your hybrid infrastructure, including public and private clouds. Check for availability of pre-packaged data capture components for common applications.

• Complete, totally self-contained solution

A browser-based dashboard provides visibility into asset and resource utilization, and the ability to easily configure customized alerts. You should be able to handle everything from the dashboard, including web-based reporting, auto-scheduling of reports, trend analysis and detailed drill-down analysis, and forward-looking “What If?” modeling.

• Straightforward creation of customized capacity and performance recurrence and exception reporting across business services

To be effective, your solution should be directly usable by both IT specialists and business unit leaders. Configuring and running drill-down queries and reports should not require complex, proprietary or solution-specific programming knowledge.

• Comprehensive reporting and planning for on-premises, hybrid, private and public cloud environments

Your CMIS should provide fully centralized access to unified, collated, cross-platform time-series metrics. It should be easy to generate near real-time recurrence reporting (Hourly, Daily, Weekly, Monthly) and forecasted threshold and potential incident identification.

Your solution should be similarly straightforward when it comes to leveraging the CMIS to find opportunities for efficiency or performance enhancement, such as identifying resources not properly decommissioned, or resources still available but not in use. It should also enable “What-If” modeling for planning that takes your entire infrastructure into consideration, without extensive training or deep, detailed domain knowledge for each application, OS, network protocol, etc.

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Capacity Management for SMBs: Managing IT for a Growing Business

• Future-proof Scalability

You are planning to grow and technology is constantly changing. Be sure your solution is founded upon a flexible and distributed architecture that ensures ease of deployment, usability and extensibility for integration of new applications and platforms.

• Expert Support

Your solution vendor needs to be not just accessible and reliable for day-to-day issues, but also knowledgeable and experienced with capacity management across platforms, across industries and within businesses of all sizes, not just major enterprise organizations. They should be ready to partner with you, providing the guidance and help your growing business needs for handling the many novel, emergent issues and business growth challenges you face.

• Capacity Management as a Service

Sometimes the best option is to let the experts provide capacity management as a cloud-based service, avoiding the investment in onsite software or database installations and minimizing in-house capacity management staffing. Ask prospective vendors about the availability of services that support organizations like yours that are in the early stages of building a capacity management function for their business.

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Capacity Management for SMBs: Managing IT for a Growing Business

Rightsizing Capacity Management

The best way of looking at the essential value of capacity management is that it helps you constantly rightsize your IT investments, architecturally and financially. From that perspective, you might well think it makes no sense to commit to an outsized, expensive and complex capacity management solution to achieve the goal.

The good news is that capacity management does not have to be implemented as a huge, monolithic toolset that only enterprise-scale businesses need or can afford. It can be implemented in a rightsized way that supports the critical operations and planning needs of a midsize business like yours. You can implement core capabilities you need today, while having the confidence that your capacity management capabilities can scale up smoothly, right along with all the other aspects of your business, no matter how large and complex your operations become in the future.

To learn more about how Syncsort Connect can help your business build a design once, deploy anywhere integration plan and avoid vendor lock-in, visit www.syncsort.com.

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About Syncsort

Syncsort is the global leader in Big Iron to Big Data software. We organize data everywhere to keep the world working – the same data that powers machine learning, AI and predictive analytics. We use our decades of experience so that more than 7,000 customers, including 84 of the Fortune 100, can quickly extract value from their critical data anytime, anywhere. Our products provide a simple way to optimize, assure, integrate and advance data, helping to solve for the present and prepare for the future. Learn more at syncsort.com.

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