Most
organizations today are faced with conflicting goals and
challenges. They have geographically distributed workforces, with
headquarters, datacentres, branch offices, and mobile workers
scattered widely. Everyone needs to access email, file shares, and
mission critical applications, and the speed of access directly
ties to employee productivity, so computing resources have been
widely deployed in many locations to give the local workers the
best possible service delivery. However, this approach is now seen
as wasteful and expensive with extra hardware and software to buy
and maintain for many locations, and often few local IT staff to
support the systems. As budgets get tighter, organizations are
looking for solutions to handle this burden. IT consolidation is
the number one approach today, taking infrastructure out of remote
offices and into the main data centre as a way to cut costs and
boost IT staff productivity. The trick is how to consolidate
without hurting the performance for the end users.
This paper
lays out 5 steps to successful IT consolidation and virtualization
projects. While you’ll still be doing the hard work of actually
implementing the new infrastructure, following these steps will
enable you to make sure that you’ve covered all the issues in order
to ensure that your organization experiences the full benefits of
IT consolidation.