Doing more with Less

Written by Bob DeCoufle

If you are a data center professional then the phrase “doing more with less” best describes your position in recent years and particularly now more than ever. A slow economy has many businesses cutting back costs impacting IT and data center staffs around the globe.

In a recent State of the Data Center 2008 report published by Symantec it notes that the 1,600 IT and data center professionals surveyed worldwide during the last quarter of 08 are suffering from the “do more with less” syndrome.

As IT managers are given the marching orders to find ways to save costs workload reductions are no where to be found. The result is an over worked IT and data center staff, but given today’s unemployment figure they are happy to be working.

A simple solution to an over worked staff is to hire new employees. Sounds simple, but with companies looking to save costs the only new hires will likely be those who they desperately need rather than someone who can assist with the workload. It is finding the correct person who is qualified that is most difficult. According to the Symantec report, over 48% of those surveyed indicated that “finding qualified applicants is a big or huge problem.”

The current climate of IT departments searching for ways to be more fiscally efficient and the lack of available qualified personnel are causing IT personnel to double their efforts. According to the Symantec report one of the three initiatives that IT departments are utilizing to cut costs includes cross training existing IT staff in other areas. The other two initiatives are automation and server virtualization and consolidation.

Client and user demands are increasing with higher expectations of IT departments. The steady increasing demand is creating a gap between IT personnel and the demands placed on them. This gap is going to be harder to fill if demand continues to increase and their does not seem to be an end in sight.

The demand for applications continues to climb. The bottom line is that most companies already have a large number of applications to manage and it continues to slowly increase. According to the report less than half surveyed indicated that they will add 11 or more applications in the coming year with less than half being “mission critical.” With the increase demand for applications, increasing expense of IT equipment and demands on the facility infrastructure IT budgets are continuing to rise.

According to the Symantec report, IT budgets are still rising. Nearly half of those interviewed stated that they are seeing annual increases of 10 percent or more.

Many IT executives see the ability to close the gap between IT staff and the demand through the initiatives we have mentioned plus others including server and storage utilization. The problem is that these initiatives require added assistance to get them accomplished, but as long as finding the correct personnel and high unemployment figures continue it will be easier to ask existing staff to do more with less.