3 Ways to Reprioritize Your IT Infrastructure Investments

As an infrastructure and operations professional, you're used to focusing on new, innovative uses of technology to support the business. However, the last 18 months have been anything but innovative. This period was characterized by project budget freezes and 20 percent cuts to your operational budget. In fact, infrastructure spend suffered the deepest budget cuts in 2009, with a 16.3 percent reduction from 2008 levels.

But all of that changes in 2010. Why Because infrastructure will see the strongest IT budget growth. Our latest data shows that infrastructure spend will grow 9.2 percent in 2010, which is the largest overall growth and well above the 6.6 percent average of other IT products and services. As a result, infrastructure spend is not only receiving the most emphasis in 2010, but shows the healthiest year-over-year delta at 25.5 percent.

Therein lies the dilemma. That's right, I said dilemma. It goes back to the shiny new object syndrome. As today's VPs of I&O see a return in their budgets they need to prioritize efforts and resist the temptation to go after shiny new infrastructure initiatives, like cloud computing.

The most important effort is to make sure the operations side of your house remains in order. Most infrastructure & operations departments are pretty good at focusing on operational efficiency by implementing frameworks like ITIL and deploying millions of dollars in IT service management tools from vendors like HP, IBM, and BMC. But that's not enough. Instead we recommend that you focus on three basic steps:

Step 1: Put the "O" back in "I&O" with IT process automation.