The Planning Season!

Welcome to Q4 2009; what we at Dataplex call planning season for most IT departments. In a typical year, this is the time that infrastructure and operations professionals spend lots of cycles burning through what remains of the 2009 budget and building plans for investment in 2010 with the hope of gathering a bit more budget than last year. Of course this is no ordinary year. Economists are predicting a long recovery from the recession, with many turning to IT to help pull through the recession. However, this can also mean another year of your infrastructure getting older. There’s two ways of looking at this problem and thus your budget proposals for 2010:

• You can either predict when you will get the rights to refresh the systems and return to the infrastructure spending patterns of old, or

• You can realise that a long recovery means a new way for IT spend is in order.

We think the latter is far more fruitful even if it isn’t entirely accurate. It’s both prudent and different because your go-forward infrastructure strategy likely isn’t the same anymore either. We still see many customers doing the following

• Continue to consolidate infrastructure

• Are repackaging workloads into VMs

• Are standardising everything from hardware, golden master server images to change management processes as consistent and repeatable as possible.

• Are racing to shorten deployment times from weeks or months

• Are learning to love automation.

In other words, you aren’t buying, running or managing infrastructure the way you used to. So why plan your budget the old way.

In other words you’re evolving into an Infrastructure as a Service cloud. But despite vendor claims for products such as the VMware vCloud, Citrix C3, Microsoft Azure offerings, most businesses can’t just drop in an IaaS platform and they have a cloud. You have to prepare your organisation and your operations staff for this. But that doesn’t mean you can’t achieve this aim in a short time horizon or that you can’t embrace public or hosted cloud infrastructures in the near term.

Forrester feels that cloud computing is one of the Top 15 Technology Trends and that it warrants investment now so you can gain the experience necessary to take advantage of it in its many forms to transform your organisation into a more efficient and responsive service provider to the business.