Shaping Up Your IT for 2009

From cloud computing and outsourcing to cleaning up your data and going green, here are top tips for managing info tech in the downturn

By Nick Heath

With the world in the grip of an economic downturn, making the most of IT spending has never been more important for business.

The Corporate IT Forum recently found that its most senior members are planning to invest in IT but managing costs, careful budgeting and trimming discretionary spending are key priorities.

silicon.com casts an eye over some of the big tech trends that could help IT departments get shipshape for the new year.

Thrift will rule the day in the new year with wallet friendly technologies dominating – from virtualisation to SaaS and green IT to consumer tech.

Get virtual

With datacentre cooling and energy bills going through the roof, server virtualisation allows more power to be squeezed out of fewer processors, by dynamically assigning tasks to idling CPUs.

Clive Longbottom, director for business processes facilitation with analyst Quocirca, told silicon.com that a virtual environment gives the "best bang for your buck" by ramping up machines that traditionally run at 10 per cent CPU capacity to between 40 and 50 per cent.

"You can get rid of datacentres that are not mission critical and use that freed up capacity to provide a built in redundancy to help the business.

"In this way IT can be the way out of the credit crunch rather than the drain it has become," he said.

Charles Ward, COO of IT trade association Intellect, added: "If you want to do more with what you have got then trying to up your utilisation in this way just makes sense."

Take to the clouds

CIOs should be thinking about what parts of the business could be delivered through the cloud, according to experts.

Longbottom said: "Whether you want to call it SaaS or cloud computing, CIOs have got to get into the mindset that there are so many processes, such as managing the supply chain, that can be outsourced to allow somebody else to do the legwork. It will allow you to free up the resources that can be invested in those processes that are unique to the organisation, to make sure that those key business processes are managed carefully and flexibly.

It should be cheaper, as the SaaS providers have the skills and they remove the need for investment, he said.

Analyst Gartner said that smaller companies should look to SaaS for access to high quality and scalable systems that would previously have required businesses to spend large amounts of money establishing and growing the infrastructure in-house.

And Kevin Hoctor, policy adviser with the British Chambers of Commerce, said: "In a tougher market, opportunities to use technology to get ahead of the competition will also be grasped, so this could be utilising more web-based applications."

Intellect's Ward added: "There is a growing acceptance to use this approach for front office applications and discrete stand-alone processes, where you don't need sophisticated integration with the back office.

"At the moment it makes a lot of sense because it reduces implementation costs and what you pay is predictable."

Green IT

From IBM and other blue chip tech companies through to Whitehall, every organisation began taking green tech seriously in 2008.

And it seems that the credit crunch will do little to diminish this commitment, with a recent survey survey of more than 1,000 companies by Forrester Research finding organisations are stepping up their investment in green tech.

Intellect's Ward said that green IT measures will be increasingly important amid the continuing economic downturn in 2009 because of the cost savings they can generate.

"There are some companies out there who have already implemented travel restrictions to save costs and so are looking for ways of communicating other than face-to-face.