“Life,” according to a saying often attributed to John Lennon, “is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
Nowhere is this truer than in IT – especially in the world of ops. Operations staffs spend much of their time firefighting infrastructure emergencies. These unplanned activities drive up costs and keep IT from focusing on the support of new projects that have strategic value to the business.
And, according to numbers from IDC and others, things are getting worse – not better. IT’s server firefighting costs have multiplied by 8-10x over the past 20 years, while spending on servers themselves has remained flat. So IT leaders have to more aggressively confront the issue of unplanned activities if they’re going to survive the coming application onslaught.