Foundation IT believes that having a clearly defined strategy is paramount in order realise the full value from Virtualisation. Our approach couples a strategic business driven focus with a deep understanding of VMware technologies.
The key reasons for having a virtualisation strategy can be summarised as follows;
To maximise and realise return on investment
To recognise and plan for the long-term effort required
To secure the support of appropriate stakeholders at senior level
To define the correct level of investment over time
To ensure ongoing alignment with the business
To reduce your risk of failure
To make sure you get the right skills at the right time
To ensure you have a long term vision to utilise virtualisation fully
Foundation IT has developed a Virtualisation Maturity Model that provides guidelines for demonstrating how a long term strategy can be developed to deliver compelling business benefits.
As the model shows, organisations tend to go through a number of distinct stages. After having proved the concept, in order to start realising real business benefits, virtualisation will often be seen as the normal policy across the organisation that allows more advanced capabilities to be used.
You can then turn to transforming your IT service delivery by restructuring teams, adopting an SLA approach and providing self-provisioning resources. Private cloud capabilities can be offered, giving greater agility to the business and offerings savings in operating expenses. The final stage is the provision of a complete utility environment for IT. At this point virtualisation has been completely embedded into the business, allowing for the fully automated delivery of applications on demand, whether through private or public cloud capabilities.
Foundation IT recently completed an extensive survey to review this subject in partnership with the National Computing Centre (NCC).It revealed:
- Only 6% of organisations surveyed had achieved their expected ROI
- 88% of respondents felt that a lack of strategy would inhibit the success of virtualization
- 58% of those surveyed have no virtualisation strategy