The world is a disruptive place, and it is more difficult than ever to effectively manage IT costs, capacity, and performance. As businesses embrace hybrid and multi-cloud models, microservices and Kubernetes, managing the complexity of it all is the important piece. BMC Helix Optimize is a tool within the BMC Helix suite that gives IT teams the ability to intelligently optimize cloud and on-premises resources. This blog will discuss how BMC Helix Optimize manages cost optimization, capacity planning, and resource visibility to help IT organizations remain flexible and effective.
IT organizations must develop advanced capabilities in order to take a proactive approach towards managing costs and capacity to meet the organization’s ever-increasing demands for innovation, service-level performance, and cost containment. The tool allows IT organizations to intelligently manage the costs and capacity of their cloud and on-premises resources. With BMC Helix Optimize, reduce infrastructure costs, mitigate infrastructure-related outages, stay within budget, and minimize risks of cloud migrations.
Managing IT Complexity in Hybrid and Cloud Environments
Today’s IT teams must navigate rapid changes, and increasing complexity seems to be the only constant. As IT teams work to keep up with the rapid pace of changing technologies and business needs, they continue to change their investments and adjustments to their strategic plan. Teams are still routinely managing a complex mixture of constantly changing environments, including outsourced service providers, onsite, and cloud services. Although the technologies and environments are quickly changing, the core needs for IT have not changed. The demands for effective service level management and decreasing costs are still just as important as they support the needs for innovation and agility.
But as organizations are ever more reliant on third party service providers and public cloud services, these goals become increasingly challenging to achieve. The number of customers that leverage cloud services and the number of service providers offering such services is also continuing to grow. As recently uncovered in poll, 70% of IT leaders find that decisions regarding technology are being made outside of the IT function.
IT decision-makers were asked to name the most significant barrier with respect to implementing continuous cost optimization in a poll conducted recently by BMC. While 53% of respondents reported that they had all of the necessary information, they still had issues because the information was “siloed”. On the same poll,36% had to make educated guesses and 21% had to make manual calculations to forecast future consumption and purchases. Only 29% of the responses use automation.
These findings illustrate that many IT teams spend a lot of time on cost optimization projects that do not seem worth the effort, lead to no new information, and, in some cases, are either incorrect or support bad decision-making. A lack of visibility leads to numerous consequences, including the following:
- It is challenging for employees to tell the difference between resources on-premises systems and resources in the cloud.
- The teams do not actually have visibility into how these resources are used, or even what is available to be used.
- The amount of spend cannot even be visible to the teams.
With all of these limitations, it is no wonder that they cannot intelligently manage decision making about cloud migration for workloads. Decision makers do not have the ability to establish or measure effective baselines to know how much is or will be spent after they migrate to the cloud.
The Implications
Organizations are paying a price for the difficulties and restrictions mentioned above in a number of ways:
Over-Purchasing:
Due to an absence of contemporaneous insights relating to their current utilization patterns and related trends, teams may feel compelled to overprovision to ensure that they have sufficient capacity or may rush to make purchases when responding to urgent issues, typically at a higher cost. As a consequence, organizations may be spending much more than is actually necessary. According to research, IT organizations usually spend approximately 30 percent on waste in on-premises environments. The amount of waste in cloud environments is even higher, with more than 50 percent (53–55 percent) of cloud dollars being deemed wasteful.
Service performance issues and failures:
Not having enough visibility into resource usage can also lead to teams not making required changes to resource configuration and provisioning when demand increases. Organizations may then be exposed to service outages and performance issues. 66 percent of respondents to the BMC survey mentioned earlier experienced service outages or performance issues due to resource constraints or saturation.
Budget Overruns:
A widespread issue is that many teams only have data that is at least one month old, limiting their ability to manage investments proactively. Teams may well be reacting to issues once they happen instead of proactively addressing matters. Decision-makers may not even discover the overspending in the cloud until they get the bill. Without current visibility on premise usage and spending, teams may purchase without realizing they are wasting valuable capital budget. So, it is often challenging for teams to manage costs against budgets using existing practices.
Why BMC Helix Optimize is Essential for IT Cost and Capacity Planning
BMC offers advanced capabilities that enable customers to intelligently manage their resources and investments across their data centers and cloud environment. One of those capabilities is BMC Helix Optimize, an advanced IT capacity and cost optimization solution that delivers valuable insight into resource usage and cost. Helix Optimize allows IT organizations to effectively prepare for changes in demand and continuously optimize their IT cost and capacity.
By providing analytical modeling and forecasting, IT teams are assured that their resources are aligned with business demand changes, facilitating future-proof operations to optimize service experiences. Additionally, BMC Helix Optimize employs machine learning principles to proactively optimize resource allocation, both on-premises and in the cloud, to reduce waste.
There are two products in this SaaS solution:
- BMC Helix Cloud Cost: This product has advanced features that let you control and lower costs in many cloud environments.
- BMC Helix Capacity Optimization helps teams make sure that their IT resources are in line with the needs of their services.
Intelligent modeling and planning to future-proof your operations:
Organizations’ IT teams can build economical and effective cloud migration plans with BMC Helix Optimize. The technology incorporates machine learning through more extensive, multi-cloud datasets to enhance forecasting capabilities. Teams can perform the following tasks using the solution and models:
- Determine how changes in CPU, storage and networking settings affect an app’s performance.
- Examine the performance impact of moving workloads from on-premises to public cloud.
- Evaluate optimal scenarios for data center consolidation and resource decommissioning.
- Validate disaster recovery scenarios.
- Anticipate how increased demand for service may change resource needs
By utilizing these technologies, teams can intelligently plan and manage resource allocation to ensure ideal utilization and levels of service.
Key Benefits of Using BMC Helix Optimize for ITSM
By investing in the full BMC Helix Solution set, customers achieve greater outcomes:
Optimize cost management:
BMC Helix Optimize gives you useful information and alerts that help you stay on budget and make better predictions. Teams can plan for possible outages or overruns and take steps to stop them from happening.
Enhance operational efficiency:
BMC Helix Optimize cuts down on mistakes, saves time, and increases overall productivity by automating reporting and allowing proactive management. This lets teams focus on their most important tasks.
Improve service levels and the user experience:
With advanced forecasting analytics, teams can see when demand will rise and make sure, they have enough resources to handle it. This keeps performance steady and user experiences smooth.
Improve agility:
BMC Helix Optimize gives businesses data-driven insights that help them make better decisions about how to invest, plan resources, and move to the cloud. This makes them more flexible and cost-effective.
Wrapping up
With IT ecosystems becoming increasingly dynamic and complex, IT teams today cannot afford to continue managing costs and resources in silos, using legacy methods. BMC Helix Optimize allows teams to intelligently manage the on-premises and cloud resources with insights and controls. In addition to cost-reduction, teams can achieve greater service levels, operational efficiency, and agility by using the solution.
