Have you already sorted your 2012 IT budget?

Posted October 20, 2011 at 8:00 am by Eelco van Beek in Cloud Computing, General, Infrastructure.

A survey by VMware shows only 41% of Dutch SMEs use cloud computing. With this, we considerably run behind on our fellow entrepreneurs in neighbouring countries. The European average is about 60%. In my opinion, this means, given the worldwide leading role of the Netherlands in fields of technology, we’re making a gaffe. But together we can turn this around. Re-scrutinize your 2012 IT investments and look at the benefits cloud computing brings to your business critical IT platforms.

With the new year ahead, you’re probably busy with assigning budgets. No doubt, you reserved funding for IT. But with all technological developments it’s quite hard to know where IT is heading and where you, as a business, will be in a year’s time. It is no mean task to develop a future-proof IT strategy for the best possible budget. Ideally, you will find a plan based on a unilateral month’s notice for you, with a price fixing belonging to a 10 year contract, with unlimited interim opportunities to adapt and alter technology and scope through the entire IT chain. That’s what optimum strategy would look like. But obviously that’s not possible.

Agility

That’s why, as an organization, you have to make choices. I believe the key component of future-proof strategy is agility. In other words, flexibility in all aspects, including budget, scalability, duration, security and speed.

A major part of this future-proof strategy is the much-discussed revolution in business called cloud computing. The existence of this technology will not have escaped anyone’s attention. But what it can bring businesses and their IT budgets is often unknown. I like to phrase it as follows: “Cloud computing offers organizations an abundance of flexibility in costs and management of business critical IT platforms, while maintaining, and often increasing, quality.”

Let me illustrate this by means of an example. If your organization is on the verge of a new product or service launch and therefore expects an increase of online activities, the existing internet platform needs to temporarily be able to extend fast and hassle-free accordingly, to meet demand. Extension of such a platform in the traditional way is generally quite expensive. As beforehand the scale of demand is unknown, a lot of extra capacity is purchased “just to be sure” and then usually a substantial part of that remains unused. You want flexibility in handling your platform capacity. Cloud computing scales your platform automatically to meet demands, parallel to actual traffic and usage of your platform. This way you only pay for capacity you actually use. No more, no less.

If you read this entry on time, I would like to ask you to have another look at your IT strategy and budget and include consideration of cloud computing. You will be amazed by the amount you could save and how easy it will be to meet your objectives. Of course we will gladly advise you on management and optimization of your business critical IT platforms.