(11-Feb11) With the recent squeeze on the almighty dollar, you can almost hear CEOs in unison across the country telling data center and IT managers to cut the bottom line. But many managers don’t like to get involved with the budget process because there is too much infrastructure to worry about. However, according to Darin Stahl, lead analyst with Info-Tech, IT leaders should start from the premise that the annual budget process determines whether IT will have the staff and dollar resources that it needs to deliver expected services. With that said, here are some budget tips for data center and IT managers looking to improve their budget management skills.
Nick Johnson, director of marketing at Uptime Software (www.uptimesoftware.com), says the last thing your boss or CFO needs is a surprise request for additional hardware during a fiscal year. “Baseline your physical, virtual, cloudcompute, and storage capacity and understand growth rates,” Johnson advises. “Don’t forget to talk to business units and understand if they are undertaking any projects that may increase demand on IT infrastructure (for example, a massive marketing campaign).”