How to control IT costs?
Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, private cloud... In just a few years, the range of services on offer has expanded considerably. The options for developing, running, storing and managing applications and data are varied. In fact, there is a plethora of them. Mastering all these IT resources is becoming a complex task.
The cloud is fantastic. But isn't the sheer breadth of its offerings an obstacle? How do you keep costs and resources under control? This is a major challenge for most companies.
Most don't have the resources or knowledge to identify the infrastructure resources they need, or even to predict their cost.
How many companies have FinOps? As a result, many companies often spend too much on their infrastructure resources, or choose resources that don't adequately meet their needs.
This type of waste and inefficiency is due to a lack of real information. Without a complete and accurate understanding of ongoing resource utilization, workload evolution, trends (or even bottlenecks or sudden, very strong audience peaks), productivity and business performance are negatively impacted.
Hence the need for a "Capacity Management" policy. This can be defined as a process used to ensure that IT is capable of delivering a consistent and acceptable level of service at all times, at a known and controlled cost.
IT: The main objectives
The main objectives can be summed up in four points:
- Identify IT capacity requirements to meet current and future workloads. This means ensuring that the right resources are allocated to each application at the right time;
- Provide guidance and advice on all matters relating to capacity and performance ;
- Ensure that service performance meets pre-determined targets. This also means proactively adjusting IT resources to cope with growth and periodic, cyclical changes in demand (for example, the Covid-19 epidemic led to audience peaks on certain sites);
- Measuring and controlling service levels ;
- Provide assistance in diagnosing and resolving incidents and problems.
Effective capacity management must enable the IT team or CIO to meet the dynamic demands of their business while controlling and reducing costs.
