We live in a world of disruption, which makes it difficult for businesses to correctly and effectively maximize their IT resources. Together with the number of users, applications, and device kinds, as well as their expectations, the volume of data is expanding tremendously. Companies’ adoption of hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, Kubernetes, pods, containers, microservices, and other IT infrastructure technologies, together with their attempts to integrate legacy systems and applications into the environment, are resulting in technology disruption. Parallel to this development, lines of business can now create low and no-code apps alongside the IT division, causing organizational disruption.
IT organizations must develop advanced capabilities so they can proactively manage expenses and capacity in order to meet the business’s increasingly pressing needs for innovation, service-level performance, and cost containment.
The BMC Helix Optimize tool allows IT teams to manage the costs and capacity of their on-premises and cloud resources intelligently. Using BMC Helix Optimize, reduce infrastructure costs, prevent outages related to infrastructure, avoid budget overruns, and minimize the risks involved in cloud migrations.
The Proliferation of Complexity-and the Challenges That Follow
For today’s IT teams, change is the only constant, and complexity only seems to increase. As they strive to keep up with rapidly evolving technologies and business needs, IT teams have continued to modify their strategy and investments. Teams now routinely manage a complex, dynamic mix of environments from outsourced service providers, on-premises data centers, and cloud services. The core needs for IT remain unchanged even while the settings at work continue to evolve rapidly. Demands for efficient service level management and cost reduction are equally as important as supporting innovation and agility.
As enterprises become more dependent on third-party service providers and public cloud services, these goals are becoming much more difficult to achieve. Both the number of customers using cloud services as well as those offering such services are continuing to grow. In fact, a poll revealed that 70% of IT leaders claim that choices on technology are being decided outside of the IT function.
IT decision-makers were asked to name the biggest barrier to implementing ongoing cost optimization in a recent BMC poll. Although claiming to have the information they need, 53% of respondents indicated they have problems because the information is kept in silos. The same poll found that 36% of respondents had to make educated guesses and 21% had to undertake manual calculations in order to forecast future consumption and purchases. Just 29% of the answers use automation.
These results show that for a significant number of IT teams, cost optimization projects are time-consuming, unsuccessful, and prone to errors. Reporting is typically outdated, offers few novel insights, and, in the worst cases, gives out incorrect information that supports poor decision-making. Teams inherently lack the necessary visibility, which has a number of consequences:
- It is difficult for employees to differentiate between the resources they have in on-premises systems vs those they have in cloud settings.
- Teams don’t have centralized visibility into how these resources are used and available.
- The amount of money being spent cannot be seen by the teams.
Given these limitations, teams completely lack the ability to intelligently manage decisions about migrating workloads into the cloud. Decision-makers can’t establish effective baselines or accurately track how much will be spent after a migration.
The Implications
Organizations are paying a price for the difficulties and restrictions mentioned above in a number of ways:
Over-Purchasing:
Due to a lack of up-to-date information about their current usage patterns and trends, teams may be compelled to overprovision in order to ensure they have enough capacity, or they may end up making last-minute purchases at higher costs when reacting to urgent issues. As a result, organizations may be spending significantly more than they actually need. According to studies, IT organizations often waste around 30 percent of their investments in on-premises environments. The level of waste is even higher in cloud environments, where more than half or 55 percent of expenditures are deemed unnecessary.
Service performance issues and failures:
Insufficient visibility into resource usage can also result in teams being unable to make necessary changes to resource configuration and provisioning when faced with increased demand. As a consequence, organizations may be vulnerable to service outages and performance problems. According to the BMC survey cited earlier, 66 percent of respondents reported having experienced service outages or performance issues caused by resource constraints or saturation.
Budget Overruns:
A common problem is that many teams only have access to data that’s at least a month old, which makes it difficult to proactively manage investments. Instead, teams may end up reacting to issues after they arise. Decision-makers may only discover overspending in the cloud once they receive the bill, and without current insights into on-premises usage and spending, teams may make unnecessary purchases that waste precious capital budget. As a result, it’s often difficult for teams to keep costs aligned with budgets using current methods.
The Solution: BMC Helix Optimize
BMC provides customers with advanced capabilities that allow them to intelligently manage their resources and investments across their data centers and cloud environments. One such capability is BMC Helix Optimize, an advanced IT capacity and cost optimization solution that provides valuable insights into resource use and cost. This solution helps IT organizations effectively plan for changes in business demand and optimize both IT cost and capacity on a continuous basis.
By using analytical modeling and forecasting, IT teams can ensure that resources are aligned with changes in business demand, enabling them to establish future-proof operations that deliver optimized service experiences. Additionally, BMC Helix Optimize leverages machine learning to proactively adjust resource allocation, both on-premises and in the cloud, to minimize waste.
This SaaS solution features two products:
- BMC Helix Cloud Cost – This product offers advanced capabilities for controlling and optimizing costs across multiple cloud environments.
- BMC Helix Capacity Optimization – This product enables teams to align IT resources with service demands.
Fundamental aspects and key features:
Pervasive intelligence for resource and budget optimization:
BMC Helix Optimize empowers teams to create a smart ecosystem in which they can optimize systems, services, and costs. The solution equips teams with the following capabilities:
- Actionable intelligence: With its machine learning capabilities, BMC Helix Optimize provides teams with enriched analysis and insights. This solution allows teams to use analytics to optimize on-premises and cloud resources, providing valuable insights such as the right-sizing and termination of idle virtual machines, the establishment of power schedules for selected workloads, the optimization of cloud reserved instances, and other optimization options.
- Automated recommendations and actions: The solution can use machine learning to generate automated optimization suggestions based on long-term usage trends.
- Budget management: Teams can set up alerts and thresholds with the help of the solution to stop budget overruns.
- Governance: With the help of the solution, teams can establish and implement rules for controlling cloud usage, stopping compliance violations, reducing cost overruns, and more.
Intelligent modeling and planning to future-proof your operations:
With BMC Helix Optimize, teams can develop cloud migration plans that are economical and effective. The technology can use machine learning on broader, multi-cloud data sets to improve forecasting intelligence. The following tasks can be accomplished by teams using the solution and models:
- Determine whether alterations to the processor, storage, and networking settings may affect how well apps function.
- Look at the performance effects of transferring on-premises workloads to the public cloud.
- Establish the ideal data center consolidation and resource decommissioning scenarios.
- Examine disaster recovery scenario verification.
- Foresee how increased service demand would affect resource requirements.
With the use of these technologies, teams can more intelligently manage resource allocation and planning to ensure the best utilization and service levels.
Benefits of BMC Optimize
By investing in the full BMC Helix Solution set, customers achieve greater outcomes:
Optimize cost management:
BMC Helix Optimize empowers teams with the necessary insights and controls to make more accurate forecasts and improve their alignment with budgets and plans. The solution provides predictive alerts to help teams anticipate potential outages or budget overruns, enabling staff to take corrective action before any overages occur.
Enhance operational efficiency:
BMC Helix Optimize provides advanced and comprehensive capabilities that enable teams to enhance operational efficiency and improve staff productivity. The solution reduces the need for manual reporting efforts, which in turn minimizes errors and delays. Additionally, the solution encourages proactive management, which helps teams avoid the distraction and inefficiency of last-minute responses to issues and outages.
Improve service levels and the user experience:
In order to predict when demand increases, teams can use BMC Helix Optimize’s advanced forecasting analytics. Also, it helps teams plan for fluctuating demand by reserving and allocating resources effectively.
Improve agility:
BMC Helix Optimize empowers teams to adapt to changing business demands by providing valuable insights and controls. The solution enables enterprises to optimize their investments, workloads, and resource allocations to best support business objectives and activities. With the solution’s enriched analysis and insights, decision-makers can create well-informed strategies for cloud migration, promoting agility and cost-effectiveness. This helps enterprises stay ahead of the curve by proactively managing resources and ensuring they are aligned with business demands.
Wrapping up
Today’s IT teams cannot continue to manage costs and resources using siloed, legacy methods as IT ecosystems become more dynamic and complex. BMC Helix Optimize allows teams to manage their on-premises and cloud resources intelligently with insights and controls. In addition to reducing costs, teams can achieve enhanced service levels, operational efficiency, and agility by implementing the solution.
About the Author:
Prashant Deshpande
Executive Vice President
Prashant heads global delivery of Vyom Labs consisting of various practice units such as BMC and ServiceRize. Prashant has illustrious career over thirty years in information technology and has served at senior executive levels with global companies such as: IBM, BMC, Veritas and Citibank.
Prashant has built, scaled and managed various IT, professional services & product development/support organizations.
His technical expertise is in IT infrastructure management, automation and managed services. He is passionate about business transformation using cognitive technologies such as AI and machine learning.