- It is crucial for capacity managers to provide capacity in advance of need to maximize availability.
- In an effort to ensure maximum uptime, organizations are overprovisioning (an average of 59% for compute, and 48% for storage). With budget pressure mounting (especially on the capital side), the cost of this approach can’t be ignored.
- Half of organizations have experienced capacity-related downtime, and almost 60% wait more than three months for additional capacity.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- All too often capacity management is left as an afterthought. The best capacity managers bake capacity management into their organization’s business processes, becoming drivers of value.
- Communication is key. Build bridges between your organization’s silos, and involve business stakeholders in a dialog about capacity requirements.
Impact and Result
- Map business metrics to infrastructure component usage, and use your organization’s own data to forecast demand.
- Project future needs in line with your hardware lifecycle. Never suffer availability issues as a result of a lack of capacity again.
- Establish infrastructure as a driver of business value, not a “black hole” cost center.
Member Testimonials
After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this blueprint and what our clients have to say.
8.0/10
Overall Impact
$2,940
Average $ Saved
10
Average Days Saved
Client
Experience
Impact
$ Saved
Days Saved
Cork County Council
Guided Implementation
8/10
$2,940
10
BlueAlly Technology Solutions, LLC
Guided Implementation
10/10
$10,000
5
Randolph Brooks Federal Credit Union
Guided Implementation
8/10
$2,231
2
Onsite Workshop: Develop an Availability and Capacity Management Plan
Onsite workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Module 1: Conduct a Business Impact Analysis
The Purpose
- Determine the most important IT services for the business.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Understand which services to prioritize for ensuring availability.
Activities
Outputs
Create a scale to measure different levels of impact.
- RTOs/RPOs
Evaluate each service by its potential impact.
- List of gold systems
Assign a criticality rating based on the costs of downtime.
- Criticality matrix
Module 2: Establish Visibility Into Core Systems
The Purpose
- Monitor and measure usage metrics of key systems.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Capture and correlate data on business activity with infrastructure capacity usage.
Activities
Outputs
Define your monitoring strategy.
- RACI chart
Implement your monitoring tool/aggregator.
- Capacity/availability monitoring strategy
Module 3: Develop a Plan to Project Future Needs
The Purpose
- Determine how to project future capacity usage needs for your organization.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Data-based, systematic projection of future capacity usage needs.
Activities
Outputs
Analyze historical usage trends.
- Plan for soliciting future needs
Interface with the business to determine needs.
Develop a plan to combine these two sources of truth.
- Future needs
Module 4: Identify and Mitigate Risks
The Purpose
Identify potential risks to capacity and availability.- Develop strategies to ameliorate potential risks.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Proactive approach to capacity that addresses potential risks before they impact availability.
Activities
Outputs
Identify capacity and availability risks.
- List of risks
Determine strategies to address risks.
- List of strategies to address risks
Populate and review completed capacity plan.
- Completed capacity plan