Sumerian, the U.K. headquartered predictive capacity planning analytics provider, has published the results of its latest research, which shows that capacity planning needs to be put squarely back on the business agenda. The study investigated attitudes towards IT Capacity Planning within Enterprise businesses (1000+ employees) and specifically looked at the frequency of critical outages.
Key highlights:
· The majority of businesses (94%) are planning changes to their IT infrastructure for the coming year but lack vital capacity information
Although most businesses (94%) report planned IT changes for the coming year, a third (34%) lack access to the capacity information required to effectively support these plans. Many companies (69%) are planning a technology refresh and two fifths (42%) are looking to undertake a cloud migration.
· Cloud Computing continues to grow in importance, but some businesses find costs higher than anticipated (20%) or suspect they have over provisioned (17%)
On average, around 37% of business server estates are virtual or cloud based, with businesses predicting that this will increase by around 38% in the next three years. Perceived cost savings are the main reason for adopting cloud technology yet 20% of respondents reported that the cost of cloud based technology were more than they had budgeted for, with 17% suggesting that they suspect that they have over provisioned.
· Capacity issues account for a sizable proportion of critical outages (29%) yet half of businesses don’t invest enough in capacity planning
In the past 12 months, 85% of businesses have experienced a critical system outage with 29% specifically related to capacity issues. Although businesses (56%) acknowledge that capacity planning will be increasingly important in the next year many businesses surveyed still rely on very basic tools such as simple spreadsheets (45%) to aid their capacity planning. Nearly half of businesses (47%) admit that they don’t currently invest enough in capacity planning but expect an increase in spend in this area over the next year (43%). Capacity Planning as a Service (CPaaS) was appealing to nearly half of businesses (48%).
The survey results suggest that IT managers will be busy in 2016, with 94% of businesses planning an upcoming change to their IT infrastructure in the next 12 months. However, although making major changes to a business’s IT system can introduce significant business risk, a third of businesses (34%) admit they find it difficult accessing the necessary capacity data required to support major IT changes and reduce their risk exposure.
Peter Duffy, CTO Sumerian, said: “Businesses need to take the guesswork out of IT planning or face a significant risk of operational downtime, unnecessary IT spend and damaged customer relationships. IT departments must have visibility of the entire IT estate regardless of its location and be able to accurately assess the impact of planned change to assure future service performance and support business expectations. If they can’t, they put their IT service capability at risk and so the clearest message from our survey is that Capacity Planning needs to be put firmly back on the agenda in order to make 2016 IT investment plans a success for businesses.”
Sumerian’s Capacity Planner CPaaS (Capacity Planning as a Service) uses specially designed algorithms to offer advanced predictive analytics techniques that give greater accuracy and can extend enterprise planning horizons well into the future. It enables sophisticated ‘what if’ scenario modelling giving IT Departments the ability to test out and compare multiple scenarios based on an organisation’s potential future IT requirements. With no installation required and no software agents to roll-out CPaaS provides organisations with a cost-effective capacity planning solution that is rapid to deploy and can quickly deliver business benefits. In addition, customers have the flexibility to dial-up and dial-down the expert services and support that they may require as part of the service.
