CIOs are confronted with rising amounts of data to store with shrinking IT budgets. Encouraging the dedicated storage team to implement these best practices will cut costs and ensure effective and efficient storage management.
IT organizations that are mapping out their configuration management strategies should assess the ways in which configuration management tools can supplement the process. With a plethora of such tools in the market, it is critical to understand the segmentation of the tools by domain and function.
I&O is a major target for cost optimization since it consumes 60% or more of IT spending. When fully implemented, our 10 cost reduction recommendations can reduce I&O cost structure by 10% or more through 2010, and 25% or more over the longer term.
Many organizations fail to establish an adequate software asset management discipline due to the magnitude of the effort involved and the lack of an expeditious return on investment. This process identifies short-term cost-savings opportunities that can be used to self-fund a SAM initiative.
While enterprise instant messaging products are typically deployed on-premises, emerging cloud-based offerings from established vendors, which include IM, will have an impact down market, especially in small and midsize businesses.
The most ironic tagline used in the x86 server market is "industry standard server." This research discusses the issue of what "industry standard" exactly means in the server context, and how such products can, in fact, be differentiated.
WMSs is a mature market and many users have aging, and often heavily customized, WMS implementations. Given these circumstances, users are increasingly questioning whether they should consider canceling the vendor's maintenance program.
Despite many recent advances in functionality, network services are still perceived as a commodity by senior leadership. Networking needs to be more closely connected to the success of business initiatives to gain the necessary priority and sponsorship.
The successful automation of IT operations management processes has less to do with tools than it does with expectations, costs, and organizational and process maturity. IT automation is not an add-on. It's a new way to manage the IT infrastructure.
This research proposes a standard metric for performance and energy use that can help identify underutilized resources quickly and become a benchmark for data center capacity planning.
This case study will discuss the specific business benefits obtained by Hay Group as a result of leveraging a service provider partnership to reduce backup and recovery costs, while improving service delivery quality.
The cost to prevent mobile device data exposures is far less than the cost of mitigation. Companies can make the most of data protection by choosing mobile devices equipped with state-of-the-art encryption tools.
The appropriate naming of the hardware and software elements in your IT infrastructure can simplify operations, decrease troubleshooting time, and improve efficiency for IT staff and end users, as well as reduce complexity.
Locating critical assets may be a matter of life and death or a costly mistake that causes high-value assets to be misplaced. Enterprises must understand the usage scenarios and which technology can deliver the appropriate level of granularity.
Many IT organizations can benefit from two sets of project management methodologies -- one for costly, critical projects and another, less-formal format with fewer updates, audits and formal change processes. Nevertheless, all projects should take advantage of some defined process.
IT organizations are under scrutiny to optimize their IT service desk staffing levels. This research explores the variables that affect staffing ratios, and what you can do to improve staffing levels.
Enterprises that approach network service cost cutting in a considered and structured manner not only can reduce cost, but also can avoid the risk of inappropriate reductions in performance.
In a recent Gartner study, participants estimated that, on average, they are losing more than $8 million annually because of data quality issues. In difficult economic times, organizations of all types must focus on controlling and improving data quality to minimize disruptions and losses.
File-archiving technologies provide the tools for better coping with storage growth/costs, reducing backup time, and helping to manage information for compliance and e-discovery. Multiple approaches are available, and each tackles these problems in somewhat different ways.
Data center managers and planners need to deal with many issues while trying to manage their business portfolios on a shrinking budget. A new set of Gartner research addresses these challenges and offers recommendations.
The economic crisis has been a catalyst for open-source software investigation and adoption. Corporations, large and small, that previously scoffed at OSS alternatives are taking a second look and electing to adopt OSS. This document looks at what's hot and what's not in terms of OSS adoption.
The total cost of ownership of a data warehouse includes several factors besides initial acquisition costs. Data warehouse managers must understand the variation within and between these factors to make a good buying decision.
Data center consolidation and downsizing can bring substantial cost savings. This research outlines sound practices to achieve the maximum benefit from consolidation.
With 1Q09 results showing the greatest single quarter impact on server shipments ever, we examine how well major server vendors, such as Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems (plus new market entrant Cisco), are positioned to weather -- or even benefit from -- the recession.
Sealed storage disk arrays from Atrato and Xiotech offer performance and reliability, as well as the promise of zero drive maintenance for three and five years, respectively. These claims are made possible by each array's predictive and preventive algorithms and self-healing capabilities.
Any refurbishment of a midsize data center (greater than 2,000 square feet) should give a useful working life of more than five years for the costs to break even. Thus, clients must clearly identify all costs associated with retrofits before investing in data center refurbishing projects.
Data center and IT managers focus on green IT, and say that it tops their agendas, despite the economic downturn. However, many do not implement measurements and monitoring, which are essential for the adoption of new technologies and government policies.
Funding for IT I&O implementations requires clear, effective economic and business analyses that align the projects with business strategies. We outline the critical steps to take when creating a business case for new technology investment.
Data center managers in Australia face important issues during the next 24 months. Based on Gartner's recent Infrastructure and Operations Conference in Sydney, we have codified these concerns in this research.
We can only control what we can measure. Organizations looking to quantitatively and qualitatively manage their agile projects need to take practical steps to do so. Agile projects are not immune to our money-obsessed culture.
Enterprises may or may not benefit from using Darwin Information Typing Architecture publishing systems. This report identifies the benefits some companies have realized, and highlights investments and benefits that can help build a business case for implementing such systems.
Gartner analysts have published a range of research about open-source software and its pivotal roles in helping contain costs. We provide this handy reference to help you navigate this research and explore the issues.
One company moved 55,000 users to a Microsoft-hosted implementation of the Business Productivity Online Suite for e-mail, instant messaging and Web conferencing over several months. The results, with some exceptions, have been good.
To optimize data center costs, IT organizations must simplify, consolidate and reduce operational costs. However, operating-system migrations are often executed ad hoc, with limited insight into outcomes.
Organizations that want a homogeneous environment with a single operating system may decide to skip a version of Windows, but this can result in hidden costs and complications. This research outlines key factors for organizations to consider before skipping a Windows release.
Enterprises that have begun to adopt "lean" principles to increase IT productivity are incorporating lean IT principles into the ERP/business application life cycle. Lean principles deliver on their potential when backed by effective leadership and changes in behavior.
Improving workforce effectiveness ranks high among CIOs for strategic business priorities. A Gartner survey of 1,600 IT practitioners revealed obstacles most likely to reduce people's effectiveness. CIOs and IT leaders, take heed: The obstacles are in your control.
If you are among the nearly 40% of Gartner clients who have not yet progressed beyond data center and server consolidation, you are missing the opportunity to reduce your I&O costs by as much as 10%.
Traditional data centers, built larger than needed with room for growth, have become an outdated and inefficient model. Design engineers can optimize costs by building to suit current needs and trying other design strategies.
The promise of cost savings is driving increased interest in open-source software; however, the roles that OSS plays in today's stressed economy may be different than expected.
Replacing hard-disk drives with solid-state drives on a one-to-one basis improves storage array performance, but can complicate system-level optimization and management. New SSD architectural deployment alternatives and automated management promise higher SSD utilization rates and lower costs.
Organizations can save 20% of data management project investments by rationalizing objectives and the associated project scope. Adopting a data management prioritization model enables these cost-saving opportunities.
Organizations can save up to 20% of data reporting costs and provide better business information by replacing fragmented reporting in disparate data marts with a single instance of widely used data.
Cost-optimization initiatives can be stressful because of organizational changes and the uncertainty of where to find the best opportunities. Benchmarks reduce uncertainty by providing comparative data on where opportunities may exist to lower costs in IT and in the business.
Workforce engagement is vital during the economic downturn to ensure that employees will remain committed to the long-term success of the organization and stay when the economy eventually rebounds.
Session Initiation Protocol trunking services can reduce voice transport costs, but they're not an automatic choice for U.S.-centric voice over IP customers. To gauge the value of SIP trunking to your organization and identify cost-saving opportunities, focus on specific scenarios.
As they seek new, cost-effective ways to store data, organizations continue to evaluate data deduplication. This research examines the benefits of deduplication, focusing on its effect on data availability, and addresses concerns about risk.
Security budgets are difficult, and sometimes even impossible, to justify if they aren't closely aligned with business objectives, and if the business doesn't ""own"" IT risk. Use Gartner's best practices to align business goals with security service-level agreements.
There is a basic assumption that investments in server virtualization will always result in overall cost savings. Although they can, cost savings depend on factors that must be carefully planned and implemented to achieve real savings.
Outsourcing and professional service providers need a sound service delivery methodology, with repeatable best-practice processes to deliver service excellence competitively. Understanding how methodologies evolve and relate to industry frameworks/standards will help you choose the right provider.
Hosted virtual desktops continue to garner significant market attention. Organizations considering their deployment can minimize cost and risks by following best practices outlined by early adopters.
Gartner clients surveyed expect to make substantial progress implementing infrastructure and operations key initiatives in 2009, despite and, in some cases, due to, the current economic turmoil.
Avid users of mobile devices demand more from Web interactions than ease of access from a home base. To gain mobile user loyalty, an organization must rethink how it organizes, offers and updates its Web presence, and the ways that presence reaches customers and maximizes consumer value.
Most virtualization total cost of ownership figures are not based on a like-for-like comparison. This Toolkit helps clients calculate, measure, and realize like-for-like cost savings from implementing virtual server configurations. It can also be adapted to meet other specific needs.
Smart multifunction products offer intelligent processing and distributed document capture. We estimate that use of SMFPs to integrate paper-based documents into electronic document workflows can reduce office paper use by 50%.
Demanding economic times require that companies take aggressive actions so that resources can be allocated where most urgently needed. We identify five areas to optimize or reduce IT spending with regard to operations-related functions.
Server virtualization, virtual machine mobility and business agility requirements put demands on server and network infrastructure. Fibre Channel over Ethernet promises to address these, but external InfiniBand I/O virtualization with automated provisioning can deliver this now at a lower TCO.
We expect no difference in cost to migrate from Windows XP directly to either Windows Vista or Windows 7. Organizations that deploy Windows Vista will spend 66% to 75% less to get to Windows 7 as they spent migrating from XP to Vista, but will spend more overall because they did two migrations.
Organizations can make more corporate use of videoconferencing, without investing in new deployments, by better management of existing video resources.
This case study shows how Leaders, a property-letting agency in the U.K., used WAN optimization equipment from Expand Networks to overcome initial problems with its deployment of virtual desktop infrastructure and enable a full rollout. We outline its approach and the lessons to learn.
Confusion is increasing about software applications and cloud computing. We provide a framework for companies to understand the variations of software applications and cloud computing.
In this time of economic distress, a way to reduce costs is to centralize IT systems. Decisions on this level cannot, however, be made without understanding business drivers and effects. We provide a road map for business and IT executives to manage the issues that arise when centralizing systems.
As a result of the current recession, managers of large data centers are under increasing pressure to find ways to cut costs in data center cost portfolios; however, they are expected to do so without reducing the quality of IT services.
As part of their larger cost containment efforts, many Gartner clients are reviewing their PC hardware assets and measuring the ratio of PCs to users and the ratio of notebooks to desktop PCs against the benchmarks of their peers.
Endpoint protection is often the single-biggest software expense in enterprises' security budgets. In a time of constrained security technology resources, these technologies offer a target for cost cutting and an opportunity for significant savings.
Determining the costs of an application initiative can be difficult because of the intricacies involved in estimating costs. Following a formal process for estimating these costs can improve the accuracy of cost estimations, and reduce the time and effort invested in such exercises.
There is much hype in the industry about using open-source software to realize cost reductions. Open-source database management systems have this potential when used with appropriate applications, gaining rapid return on investment.
High-availability data centers are extremely costly to build, but using a multitiered design approach can reduce capital expense dramatically, while still providing the appropriate availability goals for your business.
Continuing to use servers beyond their depreciated asset life can result in cash flow benefits. Although technical limitations and potential risks in server reliability need to be considered, sweating the assets in this manner is a useful cash management technique during this recessionary period.
Client computing offers many opportunities to optimize costs and help an organization achieve its financial goals. The key is to combine the right cost-cutting measures with appropriate investments to achieve desirable bottom-line results.
Organizations extending the life of their desktop PCs should skip Vista on those machines, even if they will be deploying Vista on new notebooks. This is especially true if some applications are only used on desktops, because those applications will not need to be tested on Vista at all.
Gartner is frequently asked for price comparisons between VMware and Microsoft virtualization licenses. Both offer no-cost basic solutions, and VMware can be less expensive in specific cases. Ensure there are no more surprises.
The worldwide economic crisis forces enterprises to cut IT costs. Security budgets are not exempt from these crucial cost-cutting and cost-optimization efforts. Identity and access management can help by addressing critical enterprise needs in six key areas.
During Gartner's Infrastructure and Operations Leaders Workshop, participants developed recommendations concerning I&O people, process, technology and business management. The insights that emerged reflect a changing business environment.
A basic premise of lean transformation is that it must be an enterprisewide initiative. Often, the IT organization struggles with applying lean internally, despite being a critical enabler of lean transformation in other parts of the business.
As IT groups look to do more with less and help businesses adjust to new economic realities, the lure of agile development practices as a quick path to development perfection can lead to long-term maintenance problems. Done right, however, agile can drive quality and time to market.
IT organizations remain under budgetary pressure. We provide some nonstandard options to reduce mainframe costs or to defer/minimize the next planned upgrade.
A law firm implemented a PC power management strategy as part of a companywide green IT initiative. Acquiring support and buy-in from the business was the most important factor in implementing the power management strategy successfully.
Some startling findings from our clients and some strident recommendations from us are the result of a subset of client telephone inquiries, conference attendee feedback and individual client meetings pertaining to IT cost-cutting efforts.
The global economic crisis is having a severe impact on enterprises' business continuity management programs. Business continuity management professionals must take strategic and tactical steps to ensure the ongoing viability of their programs and their jobs.
IT continues to grow, regardless of budget constraints. Although there may not be capital to build the next data center, there are ways to extend the life of an existing data center by many years, potentially saving millions of dollars.
Enterprise IT vendor managers can no longer rely on the traditional hierarchy of vendors and channel partners. Obtain the best possible value from both technology and service providers by optimizing your supply chain.
Many organizations believe that reducing the number of supported disparate database management system platforms will reduce costs. Although there are cost savings to be had from DBMS migrations, the time frame for realizing the savings is longer than expected and desired.
Enterprises can maximize their investments in x86 servers by understanding the server life cycles and creating a plan for updating and replacing these servers. Factors to consider include failure rates, software upgrade schedules and technology road maps.
For many customers, using old PCs as thin clients is not only viable but preferable for the right environment. We give guidance and offer best practices for implementation.
Budget pressures are forcing many organizations to look at ways to extend the life of their PCs. This research examines some of the options and decision criteria that must be considered.
IT can help enterprises manage expanding amounts of data, while benefiting the bottom line by implementing smart storage strategies. New research outlines tools and techniques for managing storage, while achieving cost efficiency, often with return on investment of less than six months.
Most organizations can consider extending the life of their current desktop PCs to five years. Notebooks should still be held three years for traveling workers, but can lengthen to four years for day extenders.
Many organizations are reluctant to continue the use of out-of-support applications and operating systems because of potential security risks. Although the risks cannot be eliminated, we offer a strategy for securely continuing the use of these systems.
Reducing PC energy use continues to interest organizations running green or cost-cutting initiatives. PC power management tools are often required to support such projects; here, we discuss the drivers and the market.
In 2009, Gartner's research for application leaders will focus on cost optimization, key application initiatives that drive business performance effectiveness, and emerging trends and technologies.
If "inertia" is described to be the tendency of a body at rest to stay at rest, then most organizations have inertial problems with change. Overcoming this inertia requires a few deceptively simple steps.
Effective use of matrix-based salary increase guidelines (aka, merit matrix) enables CIOs and IT leaders to re-emphasize pay for performance in tough times.
A combination of factors allows users to reduce the average total cost of ownership of new PCs 30% by 2011. The key will be harnessing current technology developments that improve PC manageability.
Enterprises can save $500,000 or more annually by rationalizing data integration tools and the associated computing infrastructure. Centralization of data integration skills can yield savings in the millions ongoing. Adopting a shared services model enables these cost-saving opportunities.
As recession spreads and deepens across global economies, organizations are desperately looking for new avenues of cost reduction. We outline some immediate steps that organizations could take to reduce the cost of office printing without negatively impacting productivity.
Using service-level agreements to guide the design of storage infrastructures can optimize the use of storage technologies. SLAs can lower costs by reducing the frequency with which IT organizations overdeliver against application needs.
Gartner looks at the cost-saving potential of Internet Small Computer System Interface and at the deployment barriers that have been eliminated by the evolution of iSCSI technology.
Content management technologies offer a range of well-proven capabilities in delivering value. CIOs must make difficult choices about budget priorities and spending for such initiatives during an economically challenging 2009.
Service-oriented architecture is not easy. Despite its proven successes, some organizations will continue to struggle and fail with SOA. Although some high-profile, broad-scoped, "top down" SOA initiatives are being reconsidered, more grassroots, "bottom up" SOA projects continue to pop up.
For organizations deferring upgrading business applications (such as ERP, supply chain management and CRM), vendors' high annual product maintenance and support fees for a low level of application maintenance has opened the door to cost savings via third-party support for legacy software products.
The Applied Power Electronics Conference focuses on energy-saving products and technologies. In the midst of a recession, it attracted 160 exhibitors, 150 presenters and 1,900 attendees -- all intent of reducing energy consumption and improving the electronics industry's carbon footprint.
Storage resource management products manage and map the relationship between applications and storage. By finding and freeing storage, and identifying rarely accessed data for archiving, SRM enables enterprises to reduce costs, avoid or defer upgrades, and achieve rapid returns on SRM investments.
This research will help managers compare their security spending with peer organizations. We examine how information security spending will grow, and where organizations continue to make investments. Current economic conditions, however, create significant uncertainties.
IT and storage operations managers face challenges for controlling costs as the number of products at their sites increases. They can optimize storage infrastructure costs by removing unused, obsolete or duplicate products.
The University of Kentucky evaluated Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 as a means to offer UC and manage growth of the university's large telephony infrastructure. IT personnel discovered that OCS 2007 could also reduce IT costs and enhance the way people communicate.
In times of economic difficulty, companies facing financial pressures will look for ways to reduce learning costs without negatively impacting performance. This report offers seven less painful options to achieve this goal rather than simply slashing the training budget.
This note discusses how different enterprises can prioritize the components of a green IT program in order to strike the right balance between short-term cost pressures and longer-term sustainability.
Fax remains fundamental to many businesses' day-to-day operations, but managing fax can be time-consuming and costly. We provide a set of steps that can help you reduce the amount of money your organization spends on fax.
Measuring and managing employee absence has significant hard cost savings, can improve productivity, and serves as an early indicator of workplace issues. Yet, few organizations measure and manage employee absence effectively.
Today, organizations support too many disparate database management systems at ever-increasing costs. This, coupled with today's economy, has created growing interest in simplifying the database management system landscape.
IT modernization will place increasing stress on the management processes involved in defining and delivering IT services to the business. There are seven key areas where IT management teams can invest in process improvement to make the IT organization fit for the challenge.
Businesses may be able to reap immediate cost savings by deploying applications on hosted or "cloud" infrastructure, rather than in-house data centers.
During the current economic downturn, it is critical to ensure that EA efforts are delivering and demonstrating business value. This collection of research examines best and worst EA practices that architects should learn to increase their success rate and impact.
IT service and support managers struggle to define, measure and use key service desk metrics to help them understand the quality of service they deliver and drive continuous improvement in conjunction with the Information Technology Infrastructure Library or other process initiatives.
To reduce cost, the financial services support firm reviewed in this Case Study entirely abandoned separation of duties inside its IT organization. The internal auditors have issued a finding, and the firm remains vulnerable to significant downstream liability.
Companies have saved hundreds of thousands (even millions) of dollars with component publishing. To make a business case, content managers and publishing organizations should understand where the savings and efficiency come from.
In 2008, electronic surveys given at three major Gartner conferences showed that infrastructure and operations leaders' interest in green IT has increased dramatically. The reasons seem to be more economic than environmental.
The Gartner survey for I&O spending, conducted at the U.S. Data Center Conference in December 2008, provides a glimpse into the impact the economic climate might have on infrastructure and operations spending and focus. Virtualization, consolidation and storage remain key priorities.
There are numerous ways companies can save money on e-mail infrastructures, from server consolidation to storage optimization and user segmentation models.
Average global IT spending is 5.9% of total operating expenses, which means that 94.1% of all costs are outside IT. If your enterprise is looking to reduce costs in 2009, go where the money is. Don't just reduce IT spending; use IT to reduce operating costs in the business.
The telephone platform is still a key component of office communications. We present three simple tips that can help the IT department avoid short-term expenditure, and help employees save time and be more productive.
Although the Information Technology Infrastructure Library's financial management process framework adds little to reducing operational IT costs, other ITIL disciplines, such as configuration management, capacity management and problem management, play an important role in cost optimization initiatives.
As organizations look to upgrade and modernize their IT architectures, the implementation of a comprehensive information life cycle management plan for each application dataset will not only lead to better information governance but also result in dramatically reduced storage costs.
In an organization, the case for actively directing PC power management is compelling. Substantial power and cost savings can be made with relatively little effort and no impact on productivity.
As IT managers scrutinize their budgets for ways to save money, they must be extremely careful not to inadvertently increase their expenses as a result of eliminating a project.
Cutting identity and access management costs for the enterprise involves both cost-cutting within IAM initiatives and operations and cost-cutting with IAM initiatives and operations.
During Gartner's recent data center conference, some important questions were raised about data center spending and technologies. This note codifies the answers and gives tactical guidance on dealing with data center concerns over the next 18 months.
In light of economic uncertainty, Gartner outlines its preliminary key findings regarding IT spending and staffing for 2009. The data collection process will continue until the end of November 2008, so the information reported here will likely vary from what is published in the final report.
Most organizations don't have an enterprise metrics framework in place, yet it is key to success in business intelligence and performance management. Follow the steps in this research to create an enterprise metrics framework for your organization.
One of the biggest challenges to developing an enterprise metric framework is getting started. The Gartner Business Value Model contains business metrics that conform to the best practices for metric selection and provides an excellent starting point for your metric framework.
Key IT management practices can help lower IT costs. The five practices listed in this research can realize up to 5% savings in IT staff budgets and up to 20% savings in total IT budgets.