Are you ready to make your datacenter a little easier to manage? For most IT professionals, the answer to that question is pretty obvious. There’s always room for improvement … in ways that cut overhead, make workloads a bit more manageable and increase the quality of service you provide to your end users. Cisco’s Unified Computing System can streamline your datacenter, making your team – and your entire enterprise – more productive at a fraction of the cost.

Here are five ways that Cisco UCS makes infrastructure management easier:

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Are you spending too much time managing your infrastructure? It’s not like you have a choice, of course. When you need to tend to your datacenter, you do it, and it’s your other IT initiatives that suffer. A simplified, straightforward approach not only cures the headaches associated with IT management, it frees up your team to focus on the projects that will drive ROI and company growth.

Chances are you’re overspending on your infrastructure. Research from Cisco estimates that infrastructure management ties up 70 percent of your budget. So, that only gives you 30 percent to allocate for the future. Simplifying your infrastructure could tip those scales a bit – making your department far more effective.

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Disaster recovery and business continuity can be a challenge to manage effectively. In addition to investing considerable amounts of capital into robust, reliable solutions, you’re stuck with the nagging thought that you’re putting your budget into something you hope you never actually have to use. Anything you can do to simplify your D/R framework comes with an inherent cost advantage, particularly through a reduction in complexity and resource-hours committed to planning and managing the environment.

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Once you’ve made the decision to adopt a managed infrastructure, you need to identify the factors that matter most to your company. Quite simply, you want to know that your infrastructure will be there for you when you need it.

While service-level agreements (SLAs) provide procedures and remedies for downtime, performance degradation and other potential problems, they are inherently retrospective: SLAs talk about how a problem can be fixed. When choosing a managed services provider, you should take a look at the measures in place that will keep problems from arising.

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In this series, we’ll focus on the implications of specific technology solutions for CFOs. Though they are the keepers of a company’s financial health, they don’t always understand the advantages that come with certain technology solutions, and IT professionals sometimes take a suboptimal approach when explaining these concepts to the finance team. This series is intended to help make those conversations easier and more effective.

You know the drill: the CFO needs to keep costs contained. Meanwhile, the IT department always seems like it’s running too lean. Demands are always increasing, especially as new systems are introduced to increase business efficiency. Every new opportunity to streamline operations across the company seems to come with an incremental burden on the infrastructure. So, what happens to the infrastructure team?

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Have you ever had to deviate from your capacity plan to add equipment? When this happens, you have to do more than dip into your budget and get the requisite approvals. You also need to divert resources from your infrastructure team to plan, execute, test and monitor the change to your server environment, which can cause other projects to fall behind. Expenses increase not only for your datacenter team but for all the IT and business areas affected. Your budget assumes a certain amount of predictability, but real life doesn’t always cooperate.

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How much of your datacenter is dark? At any given time, you have systems that aren’t being used. Oddly, this is often intentional. Your capacity planning exercises are designed to show how much you need under a variety of circumstances, and the need to handle peak usage means there will be occasions when servers and storage are under-utilized. In fact, this will generally be the case – you’ll have dormant systems more often than you have heavily utilized systems. This translates to lost potential. Unlock the potential of under-utilized systems, and you can defer IT investments, gain more value from existing equipment and streamline your IT operation.

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For new businesses and entrepreneurs, 2009 was grim. The effects of the financial crisis made it much harder to get a new business off the ground. Venture capital money just wasn’t flowing, and innovation was forced to take a back seat to the survival instinct. We’re experiencing signs of economic recovery now, but it’s still slow and cautious. Nonetheless, new businesses are starting to pop up, and the folks with the cash are beginning to invest again. Cost discipline remains the norm, however, with every dollar allocated carefully. Frankly, it’s the perfect situation for managed services from MTM.

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What if you built a website – or ecommerce capability – and nobody came? Well, that’s the problem you could have if your systems fall apart at the wrong time. There’s no substitute for availability, and an outage can cost you opportunities well into the future. An hour of dark servers can take years for you to overcome.

To combat this risk, many IT departments invest heavily in their infrastructures. Some even over-invest. As a result, there’s an operational imbalance that costs precious IT resources … and the enterprise still isn’t completely protected from serious external threats. A managed infrastructure can provide the layer of protection you need to ensure that a technical problem doesn’t tarnish your reputation in the marketplace.

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The decision to outsource key IT functions is rarely an easy one. All things being equal, the typical instinct cites the importance of maintaining complete control. Yet, the rush to keep everything in house can lead to lost opportunities for cost savings … not to mention the opportunity to use recovered budget on IT initiatives that can move your company forward. There are cases where outsourcing simply makes sense. If your IT department has one of the situations below, it’s time to consider a managed services solution.

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