Author: Edward Popoola

Most Enterprises depend on their Information Technology (IT) departments to maintain business continuity. As such, the IT department is expected to ensure maximum uptime and provide round the clock support for the various technologies behind an organization’s business process. From the core servers that run the business logic to the CEO’s printer, the IT department is responsible for ensuring availability of these technologies.

For large businesses that expand rapidly, the IT department is usually indulged for its ever increasing cost. Cost to bring in more consultants, more software licences and more infrastructure. Small and medium sized businesses (SMB) do not usually have the luxury; they still spend a lot on acquiring productivity technologies all the same.

But then, good times are over. There is financial crisis and the global economy is shrinking.

Nations are cutting cost, businesses are being bailed out, and bonuses are being slashed. The most popular of phrase of the world being a global village is now a nightmare for us. Gradually Nigerian enterprises are feeling the ripple effect of financial decisions that were taken in Europe and America. For businesses that are yet to collapse, there is so much pressure across board to cut cost or totally eliminate new ones.

However strong the impact of the IT department is within an organization, it is one of the first that gets the phone call for a reduction in budget. As such, management wants the IT department to cut cost while still delivering the same performance and overall IT value. For organizations that have legacy systems that continuously gulp a large percentage of the overall IT budget year in, year out, it is time for the managers of these systems to consider a change in technology strategy. Legacy systems and vendor lock-in are not healthy for IT departments in a receding economy. Flexibility is needed.

IT budgets get bloated by the time you add up costs from software licensing fees, new hardware replacement or procurement and staff training among others. Here are some suggestions on how to reduce costs in a way that will not hurt business continuity.

Take a look at Open Source Software

According to the Open Source Initiative, Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.

You probably have heard about Open source, but then if all that comes to your mind is a collection of free software that needs to be used only on your home desktop, then you had better think again.

Today, the Open source movement has evolved to include software developers using the Open source model to build enterprise ready software. Software products of Oracle, Microsoft and other big companies now have viable open source alternatives competing aggressively for their share of the software market. Support used to be the main argument against Open source software, but then that has changed. Companies like SUN, HP, IBM, Novell and Redhat among others are solidly behind popular open source alternative software.

Open source software gives businesses the ability to modify software systems to respond to rapidly changing business conditions. What this means is a drastic reduction in the time it takes for companies to innovate and introduce new products into the market. There will be a lesser dependence on enterprise vendors who profit from locking businesses into their one-size-fits-all proprietary systems. With Open source, businesses have access to the highest quality of software built by more developers no single proprietary software company can afford.

Cut the licensing Fees

Heavy Software licensing fees are not about to go away. In fact, this is the time companies like Microsoft would come after you for your valid software licence. Enterprise open source software comes with a zero licensing fee and there are tonnes of them out there. Businesses can take these enterprise open source software and use without paying any fee.

With open source, conventional wisdom of getting what you pay for is wrong, apart from saving money, open source software give enterprises better performance and flexibility.

Enterprise Open source software too comes at a cost. Such costs are those associated with an optional support from the software company. These fees are still comparatively lower than licence fees for proprietary alternatives. Today there are many high quality open source software in the categories of Office productivity tools, Enterprise Content Management System (ECM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Unified communication among others. An example of open source software that is being used for mission-critical systems today is the Linux Operating system.

Enterprise Linux is renowned to be far more stable, reliable, secure, flexible and scalable as well as far more cost-efficient. It is for these reasons that, all over the world, companies are beginning to see large amounts of value in implementing Linux; many more companies are already finetuning their migration strategies.

In Nigeria, Linux deployments are beginning to grow; from banks and oil companies to telecommunication companies that are known to predominantly use UNIX, Linux is enabling these businesses to deliver value while reducing cost. And like any open source software, all you need pay for is support, if you want one.

Maximizing existing hardware resources

Acquiring more hardware might be in the form of acquiring more server machines or more network appliances. Hardware resources are today cheaper and more powerful than they used to be a while ago. And going by Moore’s law, we will still see more reduction in the coming years as innovation continues to show up in the industry. But then, for the IT manager considering bringing down cost to the barest minimum, buying more cutting edge servers to run new applications might be another strain on the budget.

IT departments do not need to buy cutting-edge servers all the time they need new servers. For instance, instead of buying a new server to complement an old file server, an idle desktop system could be upgraded with a faster RAM, larger hard disk and converted for the same purpose. This is especially useful for small to medium-sized businesses. Furthermore, it is noteworthy to mention that operating systems like Linux with its low hardware requirements allow businesses to maximize investments in low end commodity servers. Linux allows you to use many small clustered servers in place of a single outrageously expensive high end server, and yet gain the same performance benefit in addition to high availability.

Pay Attention to Security

Internet attacks are more sophisticated today than they were last year. There is no better time than now to make sure your business infrastructure is secure. This is the worst time for an enterprise to have a downtime as a result of a denial of service (DDOS) or related attack. Prevention they say is better than cure. Having a downtime in the middle of a financial crises is a recipe for disaster and definitely too expensive for shrinking IT budgets.

This is the time to critically watch production servers for a remarkable or outrageous drop in performance. As such before writing off servers, IT managers should make sure security audits are performed on them to look for signs of a compromise. Common scenarios exist where business servers would have been compromised and turned into an internet file sharing server or a gaming zone by some hackers from anywhere in the world. This has a negative effect on business productivity.

In addition, the marketplace is more competitive today, thus this is also not a good time for your business strategy to fall into the wrong hands. More than you know, your competitors might be all over trying to know what you are up to.

Take a look at virtualization

To achieve more with less today, enterprises are looking at virtualization as an option to cut down cost. In simple terms, virtualization allows you to abstract as many operating system environments out of a single operating system environment, with a single hardware.

Virtualization reduces the cost of managing many real physical servers as against managing a single physical server and a few other virtualized servers. It also helps keep down the additional cost of Heating, Ventilation and Air conditioning (HVAC) systems in data centers.

A quick example of a virtualized system is having many operating systems (virtualized guests) sit on a single hardware server (host). Each of the virtualized guests will have access to the components of the single server including their unique IP addresses and system resources. Virtualization improves the efficiency and availability of IT resources and applications.

There are many virtualization options to consider today and as usual, cost is a significant factor. Proprietary options available include Microsoft’s Hyper V solution and VMware Server. As usual, Linux provides a stable and robust licence-free alternative that is available for the enterprise.

*Popoola is an Enterprise Architect at Blue Identity. Blue Identity helps businesses deploy cost effective, reliable, stable and secure enterprise computing infrastructure using the power of Linux and other open source tools. He can be reached at edward@blueidentity.com