Improving IT Efficiency in a Virtual World

Companies looking to reduce their expenses and their data center footprint have found success in moving to a virtual environment. Unfortunately, many have overlooked the process of managing that environment to meet current and future business requirements cost-effectively – a process known as capacity planning.

But a recent survey conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by TeamQuest noted that more companies are understanding the importance of capacity planning in ensuring the continued success of their virtual environments.

Of the 61 percent of the 220 companies surveyed that are moving to virtual environments, 58 percent said they had implemented a capacity planning process. Those numbers are up sharply from the 2008 results (the last time the study was conducted), when 50 percent said they were moving to a virtual environment and 40 percent had implemented capacity planning.

The reasons cited ranged from increasing customer satisfaction to improving IT efficiency, but it’s clear that capacity planning is an important element of the virtualization process. Taking steps now to ensure your applications continue to work effectively in the long run could save your company untold future costs, further emphasizing the benefits of virtualization.

Moving to a virtual environment and simply hoping for the best in the future just won’t work; planning for the future – and then making adjustments as necessary – is the best way to ensure success.

Click through for IT efficiency survey results from a Forrester Consulting study conducted on behalf of TeamQuest.

IT organizations have a fairly high opinion of their value.

Improving overall IT efficiency and processes are neck and neck.

Constant improvement and cost cutting show the most growth.

The ability to better predict IT events is becoming a much higher priority.

Process improvement and IT management software show the most growth.

Private clouds are closely followed by software-as-a-service.

Cost is still the number-one driver of cloud computing.

In one form or another, server consolidation lowers costs.

Virtualization adoption is growing across the server spectrum.

Skepticism of virtualization benefits is actually increasing.

Server sizes and application performance are becoming major issues.

With every opportunity comes great fear.

Security is at the top of the list of concerns.

About half have two to five people focused on performance issues.

The potential for capacity planning is great.

Adoption of capacity planning has increased markedly.

The focus is on user satisfaction.