One significant change with the move to Cloud based systems is that capacity management becomes a much more strategic activity than in the past.
Analyst groups such as Gartner are promoting this evolution and it is further supported by initiatives such as the ITIL® v3 refresh. Rather than a purely resource level task, capacity management now needs to be an integral part of how the business chooses what is the best solution, for example between private and public Cloud.
What you buy across the cloud could vary from simple Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS) such as processing power and disk storage through to full Software As A Service (SaaS) offerings like salesforce.com, where the provider delivers you hardware, application and more importantly, is responsible for service quality.
For anything other than SaaS, the need to use capacity management techniques to plan requirements in advance will be ever more important. Buying something in advance is cheaper than buying at the last minute. Emergency buying of Cloud resource (cloud bursts) might be easy to do but it is likely to be prohibitively expensive over time.
With service potentially coming from a variety of internal and external sources, guaranteeing service quality becomes both more difficult yet more necessary.
What is without doubt is that the range of environments you will have to manage will become ever more complex.
What you can and should do in terms of capacity management will vary with the nature of your own implementation.
From a capacity perspective you won’t be able to measure everything you want in the Cloud so measure what you can, control what you can and don’t worry about the rest. Tools and processes that support this open approach such as those provided by us are an essential.
Find out what it will be realistic for the capacity manager to provide to the business in this complex world of interacting services by coming along to our free webinar on June 30.
Andrew Smith
Chief Sales and Marketing Officer
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