Cloud capacity management: why businesses need it

by Nazibullah K. Specialist - SEO, SEM, SMM

Business has already learned to manage local resources. Just 10-15 years ago, people had to predict their needs at least a year in advance and order the appropriate hardware for them.

With the advent of clouds, the task has become easier, but the problem of capacity management has not gone away. Companies still need to be clear about what computing resources they need today and how to get the most out of them.

What is cloud capacity management

Cloud capacity management is the story of how a business gets just as many cloud resources as it needs to carry out its day-to-day tasks. Knowing the real workload, a company can reasonably order a pool of computing resources in the cloud. In this regard, Cloud Capacity Management (CCM) can be called a technique that helps optimize the resources used.

Also, their costs where usual intuitive operation is no longer enough. CCM is also associated with ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library), a methodology for managing, debugging and improving business processes in information technology.

With the advent of affordable cloud services, many companies have moved away from capacity management and focused on performance management. These concepts are often used interchangeably, as they both address the same challenge: assuring the business that the cloud will enable its applications to run efficiently and always meet its evolving needs.

Learn more "How to Choose the right cloud service model".

Why do you need to manage cloud capacity?

A company that has transferred its IT infrastructure to the cloud or is just about to do so is unlikely to continue to exist statically. At best, it will improve existing and introduce new services, which will lead to an increase in the load.

It turns out that the problem with choosing the optimal cloud capacity will not disappear anywhere: the company will still have to look for the ideal cloud parameters, in which the allocated resources will meet business needs.

The capacity management process combines a set of activities: planning, management and optimization of the IT infrastructure. Why is the balance between the amount of resources and the need for them so important when operating cloud resources?

Money is the main goal of a business

Where you can save on costs, a development budget appears. Two years ago, Gartner stated that 28% of the hardware in the average data center is ghost servers.

Business faces a similar problem: ghost resources are allocated to the cloud data center, are not used for their intended purpose, but are paid at the provider’s rates. The same Gartner has calculated that by 2022, 28% of spending in key enterprise IT markets of the enterprise will go to the cloud, up from 19% in 2018. Globally, this is a lot of money.

Transparency

Before Pay-As-You-Go (Pay-As-You-Go), when working with the cloud, it was easy to lose sight of how much actual resources were being used.

Planning

Imagine a situation: the most resource-demanding applications consumed the available cloud capacity, leaving nothing to the rest of the services. Perhaps after that you will be disappointed in the service provider, but this is not the main thing: your customers and your reputation will suffer.

To prevent this, use cloud capacity management techniques and tools. With their help, you can optimally redistribute workloads between available resources. This applies to computing power, storage capacity, Internet bandwidth.