Sumerian has published the results of its latest research, in conjunction with analyst house Freeform Dynamics. The research revealed a genuine mismatch between the IT infrastructure that businesses have in place versus what they actually need , supporting the widely held view that there is significant overspend on server capacity across industries. Worryingly, it also revealed a total mismatch between the capacity management tools and processes currently in place versus those needed to deal with this issue.
Key highlights of the research include:
76 percent of IT professionals resort to overprovisioning IT infrastructure in order to avoid capacity related issues
‘Overprovision and forget’ remains the most common approach amongst IT professionals, with the vast majority relying heavily or partially on instinct and vigilance (90 percent), system alerts and alarms (86 percent), and a range of ad hoc tools and practices (73 percent), to manage capacity in a very reactive way. As a result, less than one in five (18 percent) rated their capacity planning practices for their overall IT system resources as ‘very effective’, with others admitting they were less than ideal (54 percent), or wholly inadequate (21 percent).
Over half of organizations (59 percent) still experience downtime and service degradation as a result of capacity-related issues
In spite of a reliance on overprovisioning to avoid capacity problems, half of organizations (49 percent) have also experienced costly and disruptive emergency procurements when resource limits are unexpectedly reached. A fifth (21 percent) have experienced commercial loss or brand damage as a result of poor capacity management, and a third (34 percent) feel that it’s only a matter of time before they experience escalating or uncontrolled costs relating to the use of cloud-based VMs and storage.
More than three in five (61 percent) IT staff experienced blame for capacity related incidents when warnings fell on deaf ears
IT staff are still the first to be held accountable when problems occur, while less than one in five (18 percent) experienced praise for avoiding such incidents in the first place. IT teams, hard pressed to keep down costs, are still struggling to get their message across. More than four in five cited both lack of senior executive understanding of the issues (84 percent), and securing budget to implement and run necessary solutions (86 percent), as challenges in relation to IT capacity planning and management.
