Capacity Planning

We have seen that IT is always driven by business needs. IT simply enables the business to reach its goals, so investments in IT—and for that matter, in the growth of IT—should always be business driven. We also know that the economy tends to fluctuate, and the demand for goods and services along with it. It's the job of executive management to read the market and economy and provide projections for growth of the business in the near and long term. Any planning activity in the organization, including that of planning IT infrastructure, will depend heavily on these growth projections. We can't simply extrapolate the last five years of data to plan for growth in infrastructure elements such as networks and storage.

IT directors need to sit down with business executives to get the business projections and translate them into the required capacities of the various infrastructure elements discussed in earlier sections. And these meetings between top IT and business executives are required at regular intervals; business plans are often fine-tuned based on market feedback and many other conditions. So, as you can see, capacity planning is not a simple activity nor is it a one-time task. It's important to keep in mind emerging trends such as cloud computing and service-oriented architectures and come up with a clear road map on how the required growth in IT infrastructure will be supported. Not everything can be done in-house. After you have an idea of the....gap analysis