INTELLIGENT CLOUD
Four ways to assess and
remove dead-weight apps
Mark Ackerman at ServiceNow spells out four silver bullets to
remove dead-weight in the datacentre application workloads.
I
n every type of business, growth
is good. However, there is what
might be considered good growth
and bad growth. Good growth makes an
enterprise more agile, responsive, and
competitively successful, and tends to spur
further growth. Bad growth, in contrast,
can hobble agility, responsiveness,
and competitive success, and lead to
stagnation or worse for that enterprise. A
hallmark characteristic of bad growth is
the proliferation of multiple redundant
and incompatible versions of the same
or similar resources. What is needed to
address the bad growth challenges is an
effective strategy for consolidation and
modernisation, and a technology platform
that enables execution of that strategy. At
the highest level, your strategy will consist
of four primary elements, which can be
summarised by the acronym – ARCH.
A: Assess your current IT service
management and business resources to
determine real business value and costs
R: Retire those resources not meeting
your business needs
C: Consolidate and modernise those
resources worth keeping
A hallmark
characteristic
of bad growth is
the proliferation
of multiple
redundant and
incompatible
versions of the
same or similar
resources.
value and costs of current resources
carefully. This information is necessary
to determine which resources should be
consolidated, which should be migrated
to a more robust platform, and which
should be retired. Wherever possible, this
information should be expressed in some
metric that enables consistent, apples-
to-apples comparisons of all resources
under consideration.
Retire
H: Host your most valuable and critical
resources on a common platform that
enables easy and effective migration,
modernisation and management Your assessment efforts will enable you to
rank your incumbent application based on
the value they are delivering to the business
and the costs required to realise that value.
This ranking is a critical element of your
next major step: retiring the applications
that cost too much, deliver too little, or
both. This step is essential, as it will help
your IT and business teams to focus on the
applications that matter the most to the
business. These are the applications your
company should consolidate.
Assess Consolidate
Once you have identified one or more
compelling use cases, you need to
assess and quantify the true business How best to consolidate will depend on
specific business needs and goals, and on
the consolidated features available to you.
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