When was the last time you looked in your garage or closet to see if there was any useless stuff in there that you could turn into cash? These places often contain items that can be sold and unlock sleeping money which could pay for a vacation trip for the whole family…if one can only sort the contents properly and sell what isn’t needed. This frees up precious space and generates money. Simply moving everything as-is to a new storeroom will not generate any money.
Now, imagine if similar, profitable discoveries could be made within your data platforms and data centers. Like the storing spaces in your home, database platforms expand over the years little by little and often without notice. If you only transition from your current platform to a new one, you will miss out on the savings. Execute this the right way and you can unlock savings and improved performance while your competitors remain blissfully unaware.
Where can you win big?
The optimization of server capacity; an area often overlooked during migration projects.
Why is it so challenging to comprehensively review one’s data platform?
For the end users and IT teams, often the most visible part of data center infrastructure is a CRM, ERP, or other applications. Hidden beneath the applications, the data platform layer tends to grow steadily as the usage and availability requirements tied to the applications increases. Thus, the bulk of the total data center infrastructure costs are directly connected to the database platform.
The trap that organizations fall into is only looking vertically at applications and related databases. Add in organizational structures where there is a lack of horizontal collaboration and alignment and you run the risk of making decisions without having the complete picture. The organizations that push through these challenges and prioritize the horizontal data platform layer in their capacity optimization review can reap substantial rewards in the form of savings even to the tune of millions of dollars.
The Golden Opportunity to Unlock Sleeping Money: Platform Renewal
Platform Renewal is the golden opportuntity to leap frog ahead in performance, effiency, and savings. Typically the renewal process starts when the end of the current platform lifecycle or license agreement period is approaching, or there is a need to migrate or consolidate the data platforms between data centers.
Unfortunately, most platform renewals today are still carried out on a one-to-one ”copy-paste” migration and miss out on the benefits that can be achieved when making decisions based on a holistic perspective.
For many companies, it is just the way things have been done. But you can do it differently.
