30% of hybrid IT spend is wasted. Whether your organization is large or small, there’s no space for wasteful spending in your IT budget. One of the most common ways for a large chunk of an IT budget to go to waste is by maintaining expensive and unused capacity. This is often cause by IT leadership attempting to balance the increasingly sophisticated IT landscape with changing business needs on their own.
How Capacity Management Impacts the Bottom Line
Capacity management tools make it possible to navigate the many moving parts that go into building an efficient capacity plan. Instead of having massive amounts of capacity that may or may not be utilized, capacity management offers the ability to build dynamic plans so you can be sure that there are enough resources to go around while minimizing waste.
An investment in a capacity management solution like Fortra’s Vityl Capacity Management is a great way to ensure that your IT budget is being maximized and allocated to meaningful projects. Now, let’s explore all the different ways capacity management provides a return on your investment.
Four Ways to Save with Capacity Management
Avoid Overspending on Resources
Many organizations are unable to estimate the true need for capacity throughout their IT operation. As a consequence, they purchase excessive amounts to reduce the risk of outages and performance degradation. In addition to over-provisioning, they neglect to perform regular right-sizing activities leading to dormant or misallocated capacity.
Capacity management tools can provide significant savings by accurately calculating true capacity needs and identifying unused resources that could be repurposed.
Bottom line: This typically offers a savings potential of 10-30% on capacity spend and approximate savings per core between $500 to $1,000 per year.
Eliminate Downtime
Downtime – whether planned or unplanned – can cost organizations a fortune. It can lead to lost revenue, lost opportunities, and even a loss of trust from core customers.
Based on figures from instances of Fortune 1000 companies experiencing downtime:
- Hourly cost of infrastructure failure is $100,000
- Hourly cost of critical application failure ranges from $500,000 to $1 million
- Total cost of unplanned application downtime per year is $1.25 - $2.5 billion
Improve Employee Productivity
Automated Analytics – a feature held by some capacity management tools – generates reports that include advanced predictions of future capacity needs. These reports are scheduled to be produced automatically and are typically published in a portal (or any other content management platform).
This feature replaces time-consuming, manual report creation methods, saving approximately 50 to 100 hours per month per full time employee (FTE) responsible for reporting.
This translates to roughly 40% year-over-year savings in FTE.
Avoid Loss of Brand Reputation and Credibility
Today’s customers expect a seamless and quick experience when making purchases or using a service or product. Any amount of delay or downtime is now regarded as unacceptable and can easily translate into the loss of customers to competitors.
Having an isolated incident is common but can still result in significant damage. On the other hand, habitual incidents can severely damage customers’ perception of your brand and drive them away for good.
The consequences of capacity related downtime on brand image are difficult to quantify. However, having worked with many customers that have experienced the impact of such events, our capacity management experts at Fortra estimate that capacity related downtime incidents impact share price by an average of 0.5%.
Capacity Management Savings Success Stories
There are countless instances and stories of IT grossly overspending on capacity or underspending and causing costly downtime. Instead of focusing solely on the dangers of a lack of capacity management, let’s take a look at some examples where IT led the way to budgetary and operational success using a capacity management solution like Fortra’s Vityl Capacity Management (VCM).
Want to read more capacity management success stories? Click here.
Ready to Implement Capacity Management in Your Organization?
VCM is Fortra’s capacity management and IT performance optimization software. VCM helps organizations eliminate waste and improve the reliability of their services. Schedule a personalized demonstration of VCM to discover how our software can optimize your IT environment and budget.