To date, we’ve looked at making a compelling financial case for an investment in software and making the business case for a new disk array. In this last blog, I’ll talk about making an increasingly frequent IT decision, seeking the expertise of an IT Managed Service Provider.
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In my last post, "Making the Business Case for a New Disk Array," I talked about using TCO and ROI to make a decision on whether to replace or upgrade an aging disk array. Now, we’ll look at how to cost justify a new software investment.
Example:
Now that we’ve talked about how how to make IT Investments for the future and how TCO and ROI differ, let’s look at a few examples and see where TCO and ROI analysis might come into play for a business.
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Today’s CIOs take an active role in helping the business be more competitive, drive revenue and innovate. When new IT investments are needed to support the business, a cost justification, either in the form of TCO or ROI is required. When should you make the case for each? When do you need both?
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Today more than ever businesses are being challenged to make sound, financially prudent investments in their IT infrastructure. CIOs are under pressure to contain spending while at the same time deliver the IT services needed to support the business’ increasing desire for applications that are more agile, perform better and are available 24x7.
It is in this context that IT decision makers must decide what infrastructure (servers, storage, networks, software) will be used to support the business’ applications. And this is not a one-shot deal.
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Reporting-as-a-Service (RaaS) is gaining momentum by providing IT organizations with the analytics and visibility they need to better understand their heterogeneous storage, unstructured data, backup, SAN fabric and virtualized environment. At Daymark, we’ve seen a big uptick in interest in RaaS, but like any relatively new managed services offering, there are questions. Here are some of the ones we get asked the most.
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“Do more with less” has become the mantra folks in IT have come to live by. It is the reality we live with every day. We must be as efficient and effective as possible to be able to compete in today’s market. We must find a way to be viewed as an innovation center, and not a cost center to the business.
How we go about enabling the enterprise to innovate is what sets us apart. It all starts with a good plan and to have a good plan, you must understand the strengths and more importantly, the weaknesses in your IT environment.
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Firmware Management – The Evil Mistress
Firmware management is not traditionally a topic that anyone gets excited about. In fact, it’s typically relegated to the bottom of the IT team’s list of priorities because it’s often painful and time consuming.
From a management perspective, budget spent on firmware management is very difficult to justify and ROI is nearly impossible to measure. But firmware is an evil mistress - if it’s not attended to often enough - out of date firmware can stall an OS upgrade, prevent the introduction of new hardware or worse, cause an unexpected outage of critical equipment in the data center.
We all have stories of servers, switches, storage arrays, etc. that ran fine for years until one day, the system crashed for no reason. We later discovered that there was a critical bug fix quietly released two revisions of firmware prior to the one we were running. Grrrr!
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By Jake Roczniak and Eric Grueter, Senior Consultants
This year at EMC World 2014, EMC had a variety of different technologies available for us to get some hands-on time. Here are some of our favorites and ones that we think the industry will be seeing more and more of in the future.
