Ken Herold- Principal Architect; Melillo Consulting

As we enter 2009 every business finds itself challenged to deal with the uncertainty in the economy.  Regardless of the business you are in your company’s IT spend in 2009 will no doubt be viewed with more scrutiny than years past.  You may have already felt the impact in your organization based on your specific business.  Perhaps you are fortunate and the effect is less direct, yet the sense of pall hanging over the economy has damped the enthusiasm to spend.  However, this is one point in time where there is real opportunity for an IT department to make an impact with the right spend.  Data Center Automation (DCA) accomplishes this impact in two areas, improved change management and reduced maintenance costs, with one spend.

First, there has been increasing realization in the IT that Change Management in most companies falls short of expectations, if it’s not downright broken.  Nearly 80% of outages in the infrastructure are a result of manual misconfigurations during change implementation.  Improving Change Management naturally is an area where many companies are focusing some of their IT spend in recent years and will continue in 2009.  Since nearly 70% of IT expenses are maintenance related and headcounts aren’t like to increase, the focus on “doing more with less” is brought front and center.  Reducing overall IT costs, including maintenance, is another area that will enable customers to see good ROI on in 2009.  One of the main purposes of DCA solutions are the implementation of physical changes.  This physical change implementation is also touches the functional part of the Change Management process.  The ability to invest in technology that improves your Change Management while decreasing your maintenance costs should therefore get a lot of attention.  DCA is where the true consistency is reached in affecting physical change is achieved in change management.  This combination is what we refer to as Business Service Automation (BSA).  These solutions enable you to automate the business processes in a reliable, repeatable, and secure manner. 

CIO Insight has published a list of the top IT priorities for 2009.  These include several key problems addressed by BSA solutions, namely:  increased productivity, improved regulatory compliance, improved ROI on IT, improved security and continuity, and improved standardization of infrastructure.  There are good measureable ROI benefits for the implementation of data center automation solutions.  These include faster time to remediate issues and implement new services with less physical headcount.  Deployment of BSA solutions will increase productivity by automating the implementation of changes.  This enables your staff to spend more time on other priorities while automation does the mundane maintenance tasks.  These changes are done in a repeatable manner therefore the mistakes are eliminated and done more efficiently with better security, therefore the continuity of the your business services is increased.  Since these changes are all done in a standardized way your infrastructure will attain a more standardized look with improved regulatory compliance.

There have been some very measureable real world benefits others have derived from implementing BSA solutions.  Some examples include the ability to propagate more changes by a factor of over 200 per day.   A reduction in the amount of time to provision a new device, specifically several hours to several minutes.  Another example was an 80% reduction in the time to perform a compliance audit and an increase in the number of compliant devices.  

To find out more about Data Center Automation and the real benefits you can experiance from it, contact us today at 1-800-TEAM MJM, or email us at info@mjm.com. We can help improve your Change Management efficiency and help you lower your maintenance and compliance costs today.