Capacity Management for SMBs: Managing IT for a Growing Business

Making the case for a capacity management solution at mid-sized organizations

You already know from experience that IT infrastructure plays a critical role in your company’s ability to compete and grow.  Poorly planned infrastructure and outages can seriously hinder that growth, while a robust IT infrastructure will enable it. As an IT leader in a midsize company, you are responsible for every
aspect of infrastructure capacity management, including managing core business systems and planning for scaling up and out to handle increased business volumes, all while protecting and optimizing the capabilities you have today.

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of all this is that scaling part. It’s hard enough to get agreement on just what level of IT capability constitutes right sized for your business today. How do you adjust and revise that answer when your business is growing, changing, and morphing all the time?

Do you wait until there is a big change in requirements to reassess? Or do you try to stay just ahead of the curve, maintaining some limited amount of excess capacity and capability to handle tomorrow’s needs? If the latter, how much is enough and how do you justify investments that are over and above immediate needs, when IT budgets are set in stone and resources are finite?

Of course, you could shift to a more cloud-based stance. But whether you move to a cloud-first strategy or go step-wise with a hybrid approach, the underlying allocation and expense control problems still exist.  Achieving that elusive rightsized balance is tricky. Maintaining it is just plain hard, given all the factors working against you.

The IT support required to run a midsize business is nearly as extensive as that needed by large enterprises. The very definition of core business applications is driven by the basic requirement of being online. The email, marketing and sales automation systems, finance and accounting suites, partner portals, teleconferencing systems, and the like that keep your business running, are all online.

Read this white paper to learn how to implement capacity management in a right-sized way that supports the critical operations and planning needs of a growing midsize business like yours.