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Growing businesses must procure and deploy numerous devices and services to support new team members, an influx of projects, and growing IT demand. The demand for storage space, computing power, and network connectivity often outpaces implementing new technologies, leading to downtime, lost productivity, and poor customer experience.

With the right strategy, these problems can be mitigated and often solved. By implementing IT capacity planning early in the business’ growth, companies can deploy infrastructure that supports team members and their projects.

IT capacity planning aims to ensure a business has reliable data and a strategy for getting the most out of its current infrastructure and implementing new technologies to support operations.

What is IT Capacity Planning and Why is it Important?

IT capacity planning is a process businesses use to identify IT demand, optimize infrastructure, reduce downtime, and plan for changes to IT needs. This process involves collecting data on IT infrastructure use and forecasting future needs based on company goals and expected growth.

Many businesses that do not plan their IT capacity only effectively utilize about 15% of their IT infrastructure. Successful capacity planning can increase this to 45% or more in some cases.[1]

To develop a robust plan for the capacity of a business’s IT infrastructure, it is crucial to analyze historical data on IT demand and monitor current networking capacity, storage, and computing capabilities. This data can then be compared to the requirements necessary to accommodate projected business growth and unexpected resource demands.

Then, a budget can be created, and a procurement process can be established to acquire new technology. IT staff can also plan and implement a deployment management system to better manage and monitor business resources as they are rolled out and utilized.

When implemented effectively, IT capacity planning:

  • Reduces the chance of resource shortages or over-provisioning
  • Aligns IT infrastructure and strategy with business growth and staff expansion
  • Provides concrete data needed for proper technology scaling
  • Reduces operational and technology costs

Common Challenges in IT Capacity Planning

IT capacity planning is a process that takes time to establish and requires regular, active upkeep. Because of this, it’s important to understand the challenges that arise during the planning process and how to approach them best.

For example, a business’s technology needs can change rapidly, and making a fast and informed decision early in the planning process is often tricky. Without the right tools in place, gathering relevant information on a business’s IT infrastructure can pose a serious challenge for procuring and implementing urgently needed devices.

Predicting future needs accurately is also a challenge. Many businesses lack the historical data needed to understand how their technology has grown and developed to accommodate operations. This makes forecasting how to scale current IT resources difficult.

Without the right expertise or visibility into past and current resource usage, businesses can be left guessing as to how to plan their future IT needs. It is recommended that companies work closely with an experienced IT consultant who can recommend the best tools for monitoring their network and help estimate data gaps.

3 Best Practices for Effective IT Capacity Planning

IT capacity planning isn’t an overnight process, and successful implementation requires businesses to improve their processes with assessments and time.

Here are a few best practices that have been found to set businesses up for success in the early stages of capacity planning and make the planning process more efficient over time.

1. Prioritize Scalability

Businesses can’t always perfectly forecast increases in demand for IT resources, but they can be prepared to accommodate as much change as possible.

By implementing scalable solutions early, a business reduces the time it takes to accommodate increases in IT demand and keeps costs low. Cloud computing platforms and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions are great examples of scalable infrastructure that can assist with IT capacity planning.

Cloud computing platforms allow businesses to access more computing power without procuring and implementing new devices on premises. They can also assist with running applications, maintaining databases, and data storage.

SaaS solutions managed by an IT consultant provide flexible cybersecurity coverage and monitoring capabilities that keep the business safe and improve environment visibility. Network monitoring, endpoint protection, and multifactor authentication are all services that can be implemented early and scale without needing many resources from the business’s staff.

Thinking about scalability early helps businesses become more agile and accommodate growth faster—even if IT demand predictions aren’t accurate.

2. Conduct Regular Assessments

IT capacity planning becomes incredibly difficult without accurate and relevant data. For this reason, frequent assessments are essential.

A business must have monitoring software in place that collects data on network traffic, data storage, computing capabilities, and cybersecurity. By regularly reviewing this data and assessing how well the business allocates its resources, IT capacity planning processes become more efficient over time.

Are capacity predictions accurate? Can the business monitor and gather data from the entire environment? Is procurement fast and cost-effective? These are essential questions that, when assessed, provide valuable metrics for improving the management of IT resources.

If a business is unable to assess its infrastructure and processes regularly, an IT consultant can perform this function and provide valuable insights for improvement!

3. Leverage Automation

Automation is an essential tool in IT capacity planning because it keeps employees focused on making impactful decisions rather than hunting down data points.

One of the most common forms of automation in capacity planning is for network monitoring and data collection. Environment metrics and data are often scattered across multiple devices or services, so businesses often have SaaS solutions that collect this data and provide useful analytics for how well resources are being used.

Businesses can also automate parts of demand forecasting. Services can monitor IT infrastructure automatically and use the collected data to predict when resources will become overloaded. Alerts and notifications can be tied to these predictions so that decision-makers can implement new resources before a problem arises.

Automating tasks, alerts, notifications, and other elements needed for IT capacity planning gives decision-makers the speed and data they need to shorten the time it takes to implement needed resources.

IT Capacity for Long-Term Business Success

Effective IT capacity planning is a critical step in supporting a business’ long-term success. As businesses achieve and maintain steady growth, an effective capacity planning strategy leads to improved business continuity and reduced costs because IT infrastructure is consistently monitored and improved.

The right plan for your business supports operations by lowering outage rates, reducing downtime, lowering procurement costs, and positively impacting employee productivity and customer experience.

Capacity planning is a challenging step for growing businesses to take. Robinett Consulting is here to help you develop a customized long-term strategy that meets your business’ unique planning needs. We have provided our services to businesses of all sizes, from small shops to Fortune 500 companies, and we want to bring our expertise to you!

Contact our team today for a complimentary consultation to learn how we can bring you IT as it should be.

[1] ITIL Capacity Management by Larry Klosterboer (IBM Press).

David Bohn

Author David Bohn

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