The context:

Understanding the business and IT impact of today’s challenges

Businesses want to regain the momentum of their pre-pandemic transformation programmes, and quickly introduce new revenue-generating products and services.

But a seemingly endless series of external crises, plus other longstanding challenges, means they’re also looking closely at the value of their IT investments, and seeking savings and efficiencies where possible.

Tackling costs

Data centre energy bills in the UK have increased by up to

in the past three years.

of data centre operators feel confident in the UK Government’s energy strategy.2

With both the cost and supply of energy remaining volatile, well under one third

More generally, rising inflation and the resulting cost of living crisis is motivating businesses to make savings wherever possible to avoid passing on higher costs to their customers.

Managing supply chain issues

The global shortage of IT components is expected to last well into 2025.3 So organisations ordering large volumes of servers, storage and switches to support new projects, or a part of a data centre modernisation programme, may experience longer lead times than usual.

Businesses will want to minimise these potential hold-ups, especially if they could delay the introduction of new products and services.

Addressing skills shortages

A recent Gartner study identified that talent shortages are one of the biggest barriers to the adoption of compute infrastructure and platform services.4

With no end to the skills shortage in sight, businesses may want to consider alternative ways to plug their skills gaps. At the same time, it’s essential to make sure highly-skilled IT teams spend their time on projects that generate business value.

Reducing waste

Businesses expect their data centres to include spare server and storage capacity that’s only needed at times of peak demand and long-term growth. But this additional capacity can carry a significant price tag to CapEx in procurement as well as OpEx in power and cooling. Public clouds are not immune from over-provisioning, with some estimates suggesting that billions of dollars are wasted every year in unused cloud services.5

So it’s clear that there are cost saving opportunities in both on-prem infrastructure and public cloud services.