Today, most IT environments are constantly shifting, and the escalating costs might affect a data center's performance. CIOs, CTOs, DCOs and even CEOs must adapt to the needs and requirements, but without an effective planning process, any changes in demand could easily affect data systems which could result in decreased revenue, productivity, sales, and customer service.

When organizations lack the forecasting ability to predict resource needs, IT managers are left to make certain that capacities and resources remain supportive enough to meet the demands. All of this starts with accurate management and optimization of infrastructure, applications, and those business drivers that equate to revenue.

How to be More Proactive?

The trend continues for IT managers to respond to the multiple needs and requests (reactive mode), only to be overwhelmed by service demand peaks and valleys. Forecasting and reports need to be updated weekly and daily to give IT managers the real-time vision to react proactively so that data center capacity can remain ahead of service.

The goal then is to best determine how a data center's overall business drivers are utilizing its resources, and how the industry markets, legal, compliance, or initiatives can alter and have impacts on the outcome.

This is where having powerful analytical tools becomes important and a necessary business element, giving IT managers a more accurate view on industry trends, baseline shifts, or anomalies that could correlate costs and grouping reports.

Analytic tools can help provide a vertical and horizontal view and make you better prepared as demand spikes present themselves. Further, it can provide better control over purchases whereas each could be tied back to a real business demand.

Is Traditional Planning Leaving You Vulnerable?

When committing to a data center's resources without the right planning or predictive analysis tools, you might be left vulnerable. To ensure a data centers' resources can keep up with your market or demand needs, IT managers must automate their forecasting and the data metrics should be monitored and analyzed.

Further, IT managers must be able to run test scenarios to provide insight on the requirements their data center needs to reduce overall costs and risks. It remains important that IT managers understand not only the silos of data migrating, but the horizontal view across all business channels through their software and hardware. Such tools that can provide a full-scale horizontal view for planning and resource allocation becomes that key piece of information that is needed to best assist CIOs, CTOs, DCOs and even CEOs with metrics that the organization can use to become business drivers versus business liabilities.

Identify Efficient Assets

Does it come as a surprise that today's data centers are transforming into profit centers and business assets as they embrace cloud solutions, compliance, automation, machine learning, AI, and new, emerging technologies?

To fully understand these forward-facing technologies, the entire C-suite will need to rely on the most powerful software and tools within the market. These revolutionary tools will be required to monitor the future data center environments that are built around the lack of human intervention.

Equipped with the right tools, data center managers can improve their data center's cost efficiency by embracing the vertical and horizontal analytics that provide a full view of their data center's usage. The goal is not to reduce spending, but to have the ability to obtain more performance from what is being budgeted for and spent, to then improve service, overall.