Break out of the maintenance loop: the cloud as salvation?
Submitted by Hans van Nes on Sat, 22/05/2010 - 06:05
I have commented quite often on the ridiculous high percentage of maintenance related costs within the IT budget. During the last year many of the industries mastodons have jumped on this bandwagon. Of course, all in their own interest.
Companies like HP and EMC focused during their latest trade shows heavily on lowering the costs of maintaining and those raising the room for innovation. Interestingly both companies state that the percentage of maintenance related costs is at around 70%. Personally I think this percentage is too low. Probably this has to do with the fact that they are both infrastructure companies so they focus on the infrastructure related costs. EMC admits that some of the innovation, or invest costs as they call it, are used to improve the management of legacy. To bypass confusion, we should talk about the percentage of IT budgets used for operating and maintaining legacy application ends hardware infrastructure. Using this definition I see percentages far above 80% with most companies.
The solution to break out on the maintenance loop is, unsurprisingly, focused at introducing The Cloud as the all encompassing way out. I admit that in some cases virtualizing applications and infrastructure can help. But careful readers of my earlier blogs no that's my advocates of business innovation driven IT usage and that is much more than swapping your in-house server for a SaaS solution.
In what way are my ideas different from those of the big infrastructure suppliers? Well they start bottom-up by focusing on the operational costs of processing, data storage, and the closely support for non-standard or outdated technology. My approach is top down. First ask yourselves what could sustain or grow your company’s success. Translated this into required IT support and only then ask yourselves if the presence legacy or the newest market options are fit for those requirements. Both investments and operational costs play a role.
The results of both approaches could be the same. But it is more likely that the infrastructure vendors will add storage capacity took over the world's ever growing hunger for data, whereby I question in many cases if more data means better business information.
I think we should watch out that in order to break out of the maintenance loop we just introduce new technology for technology's sake. Yet again we're getting that it is all about business innovation.
As always, your comments are welcomed.
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