Capacity planning is crucial in ensuring your IT infrastructure and cloud is able to support and provide optimal performance for your business through peaks and troughs in demand. However, it can be difficult to know where to begin your planning. Should you start by looking at business demand forecasts? Which of your applications or platforms should you tackle first?
Our new capacity planning template can help you create an exhaustive method for planning every element of your IT, without the need to spend days outlining structure.
Why is Capacity Planning Important?
Accurate planning and forecasting ensure that your IT is able to support growing or peak demand, without any impact on end-user experience or incurring skyrocketing costs for additional capacity.
Simply by having a concrete plan in place that identifies your IT’s strengths and weaknesses, your business can minimise risk and the likelihood of service impacting incidents, cut-down on capacity wastage and ensure the right capacity is in place at the right time.
However, it’s not all about foreseeing potential issues and lessening risk: capacity planning can also help you deliver a better quality of service to your customers, reduce costs, and cut the time it takes you to complete IT projects.
What Goes into a Capacity Plan?
We’ve established the benefits of capacity planning, but you could be forgiven for wondering what goes into the document itself. The capacity of your business’s entire IT infrastructure is a potentially vast subject, so here are a few pointers for getting started:
- Recommendations — This section should detail any recommendations for the capacity plan and assess the status of those made in the previous edition.
- Business capacity management — A review of the business demand forecast, as well as any future business initiatives that are likely to affect demand.
- Service capacity management — This section should include the service demand forecast, as an assessment of current service levels and performance.
- Component capacity management — A summary of performance, utilisation and demand for each of your platforms, whether owned infrastructure or cloud.
- Capacity plan — The forecast for peak periods during the scope of your project and the predicted capacity of each of your components.
- Plan vs actual — A review of how the previous capacity plan measured up against actual results.
- Service improvements — recommendations for where your service could improve.
- Costs — The estimated cost of any recommended improvements.
Without a clear plan, it’s difficult to adequately prepare for peak demand or get the very best performance from your IT infrastructure during busy periods. Our new template gives you everything you need to create a comprehensive plan for upcoming IT projects, times of high demand and day to day capacity management within your business. To download your copy, click here.
Alternatively, if you’d like to learn more about capacity management including its benefits as well as the impact of insufficient capacity or unacceptable performance, download our Capacity Management Primer.
