What is Capacity Planning?
IT capacity planning is a process used to manage IT service delivery. The practice ensures that the right resources are available at the right time to minimize risk, avoid outages, and manage resources and cost effectively. Capacity planning requires intimate knowledge of system performance during peak and off-peak times and often involves trained professionals who examine your IT infrastructure and historical performance data to make accurate predications based on huge amounts of data.
Many IT teams do not have an in-house capacity planning expert and often hire out this service or work with their business partner to determine their need. Alternatively, you can achieve IT capacity planning with capacity planning tools that capture historical performance data and provide powerful analysis features or use queuing theory to predict the behavior of your systems, applications, and services. These results help your IT team know what to expect and how to prepare your infrastructure. Capacity planning solutions can help you predict risks, enhance service, and create value for your business—all while avoiding costly outages.
Who Needs to Do Capacity Planning?
The short answer? Everyone. Every business—no matter the industry—has its own unique peak time of the year. A lawn and garden business will be busy in the spring while the swimming pool business booms in the summer. An office products store is busy in the fall when the school year starts. And don’t forget tax season for our banking and finance friends and the holiday shopping season for retailers. Peak season can be stressful if you’re not well-prepared. IT teams must ensure all mission-critical systems will support all customer transactions without introducing downtime. With the help of capacity planning tools, you can be confident that your IT systems will run optimally regardless of the time of the year, instead of crossing your fingers this busy season.
Finance
When customers trust banking and financial service institutions with their money, they expect it to be available. That’s why it’s critical to ensure strong infrastructure to process customer transactions, applications, trades, transfers, and more.
Retail
Any outage of a POS system can be catastrophic, but especially when transactions are unusually high, like on Black Friday. Retail outlets turn to capacity planning to keep their systems up and running so they can focus on providing excellent customer service.
Telecommunications
Telecommunications companies must keep powerful systems up and running to avoid outages to their many customers. Capacity planning helps to ensure systems can handle workloads and zeros in on any problems to make a plan for proper corrective action.
Capacity Planning across Platforms
Whether operating on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment, capacity planning impacts your entire IT infrastructure. A great capacity planning solution can give help you achieve the highest level of service optimization maturity across any platform.