IT Cost Management

“That’s always been an issue within organizations,” Strauss says. “They don’t continue to invest over time in understanding the systems that they have and how to leverage them better. If they did that, they would be more efficient.”

2. Cloud Computing

With cloud computing, a portion of a company’s computer hardware, operating systems, and software are not held on site, but are accessed through the Internet. (Read “In the Cloud” on page 76 to get the full story on cloud computing.) Companies subscribe to cloud computing services in order to access common business applications via a Web browser. The software and data for the applications are stored on the provider’s servers, wherever it is most efficient to keep them, and are accessed dynamically as needed.

Subscribing companies have at their disposal all the power of the provider’s data centers. Many experts feel that cloud computing is especially appropriate for large but infrequent tasks that would require businesses to invest in infrastructure that they otherwise wouldn’t need, but cloud computing can be used for everyday tasks as well.

Cloud computing rejiggers budgets in a dramatic way, O’Konski says. “You also reduce other costs that aren’t inherently within IT, like facility costs—power, cooling, heating, space leasing, and so on,” he explains. “The cost equation for IT doesn’t necessarily have to come directly out of an IT budget. It can come out of other budgets, from a facilities perspective.” And when it’s time to grow again, the business can grow virtually instead of physically.

3. Removing Redundancy

Most of the files a company stores contain chunks of data that are identical to data in other files—think of e-mail file attachments, or forms that all contain the same fields. The identical portions are stored over and over, as part of the files that contain them. But through a process called data deduplication, the identical portions can be referenced instead of repeated, saving massive amounts of space and vastly reducing backup time.

How big an impact can this have? Companies are in the habit of generating data at a stunning rate. They buy more and more storage to accommodate their corporate networks and their data. With deduplication, they can reduce costs and avoid new purchases.

“It can reduce the amount of data you have to back up anywhere from 20 to 80 percent, because this technology recognizes that a lot of these files look the same,” O’Konski says. “It doesn’t need to back up the bit or block the same way over and over again.”