From Excess to Efficiency

Did you know that TV dinners have Thanksgiving to thank? In 1953, someone at Swanson misjudged the number of frozen turkeys they would sell that Thanksgiving – by 26 tons! Salesman Gerry Thomas, inspired by the aluminum trays airlines had started using to serve in-flight meals, came up with a brilliant plan: Why not slice up the meat and repackage it with some trimmings? Thus, the first TV dinner was born!

Today’s organizations face similar challenges. How can we ensure an IT environment in which there are no extras? One in which every IT resource – people, processes and technologies – is allocated to deliver optimal business outcomes while minimizing cost and inefficiencies? While the answer’s not as simple as repurposing extra turkey in an aluminum container, there are steps today’s organizations can take to alleviate and prevent excess IT resources while optimizing current investments.

• The first step towards avoiding excess and achieving more optimized IT resources begins with simplifying the existing infrastructure. This begins with an evaluation of the applications used in your IT infrastructure. Not only can it help eliminate redundancies, it can also identify any network issues. There are numerous tools available to facilitate this evaluation, or you might also utilize a partner, like OneNeck, to assess and recommend necessary steps to optimization.
• Expand resource utilization-many organizations waste valuable compute and storage with an excess and unnecessary amount of hardware, which leads to increased energy and labor costs. Operating your IT infrastructure with optimally-utilized hardware and a fully-developed virtualization strategy can have a dramatic positive effect.
• Increase DR site utilization-many organizations have excess server and storage resources sitting idle at their disaster recovery (DR) site. If this sounds familiar, consider leveraging your DR site resources for dev/test – at least until they become necessary should a disaster strike. Another consideration: use your DR and snapshot technologies, to make it easier to create a local or remote copy of your production data. The use of deduplicated data greatly reduces in-use storage, and replica data sets can be made almost instantly.
• As virtualization and the cloud continue to proliferate, businesses are looking for more ways to automate processes in order to reduce the excessive time it takes to perform a wide-range of IT functions. From provisioning to updating and providing ongoing management, the need for increased automation is even more critical when servers, storage and networks are managed from a centralized location.
• Automation is one step toward simplification and removal of excess, especially when it comes to provisioning and managing infrastructure. You can also simplify deployments by eliminating excessive tools. You might also look at only deploying tools that truly complement each other, are full-featured and fit your IT environment and methods. Using effective tools means spending less time learning, which can lead to enhanced productivity.
• Reduce the on-site data center footprint-with the ever-increasing growth of information, there’s a constant need for more space. Yet, it can be difficult to access capital to build a new data center or renovate and increase the current data center. There are other options to building and managing your own space, including colocation and cloud. With a trusted partner, like OneNeck, these options could help you reduce your excessive capital expenditures while providing cost-savings, flexibility and scalability.

In an increasingly complex and hybrid world, IT infrastructures must evolve to address the changing requirements. IT has to be faster, more agile, easily scalable and cost-efficient. To move your business from excess to efficiency, consider teaming with a trusted IT partner, such as OneNeck, for help. OneNeck takes a pragmatic approach to evaluating each customer’s current IT resources. With a keen focus on your short-term and long-term business objectives, OneNeck’s unique ability to view your business through a technology lens truly sets us apart. We look across functional silos and technology boundaries. For your company, it adds up to realizing new opportunities, better prioritization and greater optimization of your IT investments — moving you from excess to efficiency.