Five Ways to Increase Infrastructure Management ROI

In today’s ever-changing technology landscape, success of a business largely depends on a top-notch 24×7 business service availability. To achieve a competitive edge, businesses are focusing on optimizing IT infrastructure to streamline key processes. However, even after heavy investments, primary issues concerning application performance, security, management, scalability and actual utilization of available resource remains unclear.

If a business wants peak performance and attain better ROI, they need to develop highly optimized application delivery infrastructure.

What’s The Cost of Infrastructure Monitoring and Management?

• License Cost: Infrastructure monitoring and management solutions can be licensed through one-time license fee or on a monthly or annual subscription basis.
• Product Maintenance, Support Cost: These are optional costs depending on level of customer support offered and if product upgrades are included or kept separate.
• Dedicated Hardware or Software Costs: This covers the price of the hardware, for example a server or appliance that is required to run the solution and additional software components such as Windows licenses etc.
• Installation/Implementation Costs: There might be cases where in the cost of installation, implementation can be equivalent or higher, than the cost of the up-front license.
• Training Costs: One must include the initial training costs, as well as any on-going training costs that might be required to be imparted to the staff over the period of time.

How to increase Infrastructure Management ROI?

Let us look into some of the ways that would have a positive impact on Infrastructure Management ROI

1. Virtualization: If X number of physical machines is consolidated onto X number of virtual machines running on a single physical server, the savings can be worth considering. However, virtual infrastructures come with its own challenges such as complexities of managing, tracking, and controlling. This very often exceeds the capabilities of management tools provided with virtual infrastructures. This issue can be overcome by Automated Workload Provisioning as it monitors, tracks, and enforces policies that control resource consumption, along with compliance with internal standards on how machines should be built and managed.

2. Automation: Highly trained IT professionals are required to maintain the complex networks configure new users and look into support calls. Automated technology helps maintaining or even reduces headcount eliminating manual entry, offers a formidable return. In most scenarios, infrastructure management utilizes IT professionals to focus on more critical projects, which can reduce costs and achieve increased revenue.

3. Infrastructure Consolidation: As organizations have become more geographically scattered, installing and managing IT infrastructure has become increasingly costly and complex. This would lead to reduction in capital costs as IT infrastructure resources are consolidated and shared within an organization along with more efficient and reliable data back-up and recovery.

4. Managing Service Level Agreements: Basically, SLAs are agreements between service providers and clients that outline the baseline levels of service to be delivered. SLM is a key requirement for knowing how the various elements of an IT infrastructure are working to support the objectives of the Managed Service Provider’s (MSPs) client. As SLA links client’s requirements to infrastructure requirements, it allows MSPs to link service levels to service cost and, consequently set profitable pricing. Note: by spending wisely on exact requirements, MSPs can achieve more efficient cost management.

5. Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM): With data centers becoming more complex and advanced, organizations are positioning a new set of advanced infrastructure management solutions that help measure and monitor data center resources and equipment, to ensure increased efficiency in performance. DCIM implementation offers several significant benefits, from increased time and cost savings, to improved productivity and a better ROI. DCIM provides increased ROI through –

• Increased data center efficiency in terms of energy
• Improved data center availability
• Improved data center manageability

From an organizational point of view Infrastructure Management is one of the key factors towards success. It is imperative for an organization to keep an undeterred focus on Infrastructure Management thus ensuring high performance and 24×7 availability of critical business application resulting in higher ROI.