IT centralization is back in fashion

The move wasn't aimed at cutting costs, but "the timing was good," White says. It reduced the charitable organization's technology footprint, encouraged more virtualization and lowered maintenance and power costs. "It was an unanticipated benefit," he says. "We looked like geniuses."

And White says that for the first time he feels that the organization has a strong disaster recovery strategy, thanks to consolidated storage and a fully replicated set of servers in a remote data center in Phoenix.

For decades, the pendulum has swung between centralized IT organizations and decentralized operations featuring small IT groups in each business unit. But with the urgent need to cut costs today, there's a good argument to be made for the former arrangement. With technology assets in one place, it's easier to take advantage of developments such as virtualization, storage de-duplication, cloud computing and outsourcing, all of which promise to lower costs.

Centralization also makes it easier to create an effective disaster recovery strategy, minimize labor redundancies, get volume discounts on technology purchases, and lower maintenance and training costs through standardization, proponents say.

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