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IT world

1) Reducing IT costs is more important than ever
According to Financial Insights, virtualization is one of the top five priorities for IT spending in the financial services industry. Server and endpoint virtualization are transforming IT operations by reducing costs through higher resource utilization. This offers financial institutions a streamlined, automated and cost-effective way to deploy and support both computing resources and users, while also meeting regulatory requirements for privacy and reporting.

Andi Mann, Research Director at Enterprise Management Associates, has noted 90 percent of enterprises report real and measurable ROI from virtualization in general. This translates into renewed opportunity for financial institutions to leverage virtualization as a cost saving measure.

This includes server initiatives. Standardizing on a common set of tools at the software layer can greatly reduce operational complexity across heterogeneous operating systems, storage and applications. Financial services institutions can lower their costs with tiered storage. Older files can be moved to less expensive storage devices without changing the way users or applications access those files.

An interesting article, do check it out, there’s a lot in the press and buzz around the city with organizations seeking to reduce costs. Related to this there’s the IT needs to become more efficient, we need to virtualize more, be more efficient in the data center amongst other things. It’s absolutely right, but we need to be taking a more wholistic approach, recgonizing that virtualization is an enabler, that we can be more efficient, but we need to:

1. First
   1. Understand what we have in the data center
   2. How it relates to the business lines/applications
   3. Who owns what in the data center
   4. Value it in terms of support cost/power and benefit of upgrading, the hardware might be easy, but what’s the cost of re-coding the application or having it validated against a ‘new platform’, DL380G6 against a DL380.
2. Second
   1. Where is it we want to be and what are the priorities
   2. If it’s cost should we commoditize the platform, the cheapest low cost servers which are disposable and replaced every few years?
   3. If it’s reliability should we not be bringing everything up to the same level (patches/firmware), tidying up configurations and locking down platforms where appropriate.
   4. If it’s grid, have we done the due diligence application testing and established which applications are compatible with grid, what changes need to be made to the code or the infrastructure.
   5. If it’s automation, what can we automate or script now, where are the quick wins in terms of effort and cost against benefit.
3. Transformation
   1. How are we intending on moving to the next generation infrastructure, are we doing this by application, by network or business line? Do we move in stages or do we simply start mass porting applications and services on to this new platform.
   2. Do we include data center transformation and can it run at the same time with server refresh projects, and operating system or application upgrade projects – what is dependent on what, what do we wait for and what needs to go ahead regardless?

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