Scaling Up for Future: Capacity Management for 2024 & beyond

What is Capacity Management?

Capacity management in IT refers to the strategic actions involved in planning, monitoring, and optimizing the utilization of resources within an IT, Cloud or Network environment to ensure that it can meet current and future demands efficiently. The primary goal of capacity management is to ensure that IT infrastructure and services have the right amount of resources (such as computing power, storage, and network bandwidth) available at the right time to support business operations.

Capacity management comes into IT service management because IT resources are precious, scarce and expensive. If there is not enough capacity maintained, things could be under-served and if there’s overcapacity after spending funds, there can be more resources than required hence not fully optimizing the budget. This also avoids overuse or misuse when higher capacity was added. But one can argue that having enough capacity and abundance of resources is always great – yes that’s true but when it comes at a cost above and beyond your budgets or profits, it can certainly hamper budget and investments for other other expenses and other departments. Another important thing is for some IT resources it is a matter of warranty. A resource much higher in capacity starts and ends its warranty earlier compared to a resource bought or extended later where warranty will still be valid.

Why is Capacity Management Important?

1. To avoid under-serving needs due to limited capacity
2. Customers suffer when there are insufficient resources to meet demands
3. Prevent overspending from excessive unused capacity
4. Unused capacity represents wasted IT spending that provides no value
5. Optimize budgets by right-sizing resources
6. Plan infrastructure additions to closely match rising business needs
7. Plan warranty and replacement cycles effectively
8. Balance performance, warranties and costs over the system lifecycle
9. Gain alignment with quarterly budgets and financial approvals
10. Capacity changes must fit within budgetary constraints

Best practices for Capacity Management

1. Monitor usage to predict capacity needs
2. Analyze trends to plan ahead for future growth
3. Upgrade capacity in advance to meet growing demand
4. Add resources proactively to prevent service disruptions
5. Compare costs for cloud vs on-prem capacity
6. Weigh tradeoffs of different delivery models
7. Plan capacity changes around financial approval cycles
8. Coordinate budget approvals for new infrastructure
9. Extend warranties for existing hardware until added capacity budgeted
10. Maintain system reliability past initial warranty periods

Key Areas for Capacity Management

Network Bandwidth

• LAN, WAN, Internet breakout/DIA, ISP bandwidth
• Provide adequate internal and external connectivity
• WLAN / WiFi transmitting, receiving capacity

Storage Capacity

• Hard drives, SAN devices, cloud storage
• Store data while minimizing infrastructure costs
• Network Attached Storage / NAS capacity

Server Processing Power

• RAM, CPU cores, virtual machines
• Distribute processing for optimal application performance

Cloud Infrastructure

• EC2, VM instances, S3 buckets and online block storage
• Autoscaling groups, number of accounts and subscriptions
• Adjust cloud-based resources to meet variable demand

In summary…

Capacity management refers to the optimal usage and planning for “minimum” and “maximum” IT resources to balance between under-capacity and overcapacity. Capacity management is essential because it lets organizations make the best use of existing capacity and plan for upgrading capacity while keeping the costs within budget.

IT managers, CTO/CEOs should ensure that there is enough capacity to cater the growing need and demand of the customers and employees for achieving the goal of the organization.