Navigate Economic Slowdown By Doing More With Less
The effects of a declining economy are reverberating throughout the global market, changing the way we approach current transactions and altering future planning in every industry. Though the rocky descent is expected to stabilize soon, we'll likely feel the repercussions for years to come. Enterprises will be more cautious. They'll make more conservative choices. And, like the consumers that support them, they'll take fewer risks.
Enabling the Next Wave of IT
Moving to a virtualized environment allows organizations to do more with less.
Smart corporate leaders recognize, however, that while a short-term economic slowdown means tightening your margins, you still have to maintain a competitive edge. You must work through the uncertainty and fear to make smart decisions for your corporation's future growth, even when those decisions are influenced by outside forces beyond your control.
In most cases, this tightening means looking for ways to be more productive and efficient with fewer resources. But it's not all about cutting costs. More often, it's about maximizing assets and making them work harder for you. This is especially true when it comes to technology. One of the biggest temptations right now will be to cut spending on IT. Technology investments tend to be more discretionary than other operational expenses, and it is easy to underestimate their embedded value to the enterprise. But IT touches every aspect of your business every day, and weakening that intrinsic system may do you more harm than good.
A more sensible option is to rethink the way you approach IT, altering your systems to better support, align and enhance your overall business. In other words, get a better return on your investment and make the most of what you've got.
In looking at ways to do more with less, many businesses – including HP clients – are rethinking virtualization. This is neither a single implementation nor a single technology. Rather, virtualization is a collection of capabilities that provide greater resource utilization without the limitations of the underlying physical infrastructure. It can mean many things, including dividing a computer into multiple execution environments, consolidating server space or sharing software across multiple platforms – flexible options that let you rearrange and redeploy resources in real time to meet changing user and transaction requirements. It also means less downtime, which translates to better availability and a more productive worksite.
Beyond these operational advantages, virtualization also has concrete and tangible business benefits like saving physical space, energy and money. For example, the utilization level of physical servers in an IT infrastructure is approximately 15 to 20 percent because you need the extra resources in case a server peaks or grows. With virtual servers, you can move from one server to another within seconds so you're free to maximize your capacity at any given time. And of course, fewer servers means lower total cost of ownership in power, cooling, maintenance and replacement costs.
To best take advantage of these benefits, you must assure you have proper management and orchestration of your virtualization efforts. For many companies, this means outsourcing your virtualization services. It's a move that will free your internal resources and move a vital function into expert hands. HP's server virtualization services combines the right talent, industry knowledge and technical expertise to do it right. We have a foundation of more than 45 years experience in IT services on which to build your unique solution. And we can help you craft a long-term plan that considers the function and expense of your IT system as a whole and charts a complete course to meet the organization's goals.
This multiyear technology plan enables your legacy systems to continue supporting your operations while new infrastructure is developed. Most importantly, in the face of financial recession, having a comprehensive IT roadmap builds maximum asset utilization and enables you to adjust operational IT expenses. Achieving greater efficiencies removes overhead and lowers TCO on the balance sheets – a move which may prove to be very timely.
Throughout the global economy, businesses are pulling back. They're making difficult choices to solve short-term problems, and many will not weather the storm. Those that survive and thrive are making efficiency-driven change, not just quick fixes, altering their course in a way that shores them up for a longer journey ahead. These enterprises are open to innovative options like virtualization as a beneficial component of a highly flexible business solution. It's a measured move that will keep them on the leading edge for years to come.