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•Guest Column: Cost Containment: The Order Of The Day

By Jon Toigo, Toigo Partners International

A new approach is needed to contain the cost of that IT infrastructure component that consumes the lion's share of both CAPEX and OPEX budgets in most IT shops — data storage.

It doesn't take a Harvard MBA to understand why, in the current state of things, companies are looking to reduce capital and operational expenditures wherever they can. While this is certainly a path that company bosses always claimed to be pursuing — in good times and bad — we know that cost containment philosophy has not always been applied in a disciplined way.

Truth be told, many businesses became profligate spenders, especially on tech, when their wallets were flush. Unfortunately, these spending sprees rarely addressed the root causes of problems, focusing instead on symptomology. Simply put, a lot of companies dumped a lot of money into more processor, more bandwidth, and more storage capacity to address problems that were caused by inefficient business processes, inelegant or poorly written application software, poor application hosting choices, ineffective infrastructure management approaches, and abysmally poor data management. In the process, IT became costly, complex, and prone to outages.

In many discussions I have had with senior managers and directors of companies, IT is described as "important" or even "mission critical," but it is also described as "terribly costly" or "extremely wasteful" — "an investment that we wish we didn't need to make." In the front office, IT is often regarded as an arms race required to remain competitive in the market. As for the cost of technology, blame is often placed on the IT department itself for deploying "solutions" without considering fully the business problems being solved and without providing metrics for measuring success.

Click Here To Download:
•Guest Column: Cost Containment: The Order Of The Day