- The Importance of Service Management
- Step 1: Define Your IT Services
- Step 2: Define Your IT Service Levels
- Step 3: Identify IT Growth Projections
- Step 4: Identify Critical IT Assets
- Step 5: Identify IT Opportunities and Risks
- Step 6: Establish IT Control and Design Objectives
- Next Steps
- Harris Kern's Enterprise Computing Institute
Step 3: Identify IT Growth Projections
To plan capacity, you need to quantify the expected growth in IT service demand. The best projections are based on models utilizing built-in feedback mechanisms to ensure both accurate inputs and planning assumptions. IT growth projections may also include strategies for meeting anticipated growth. The main objective is to understand IT performance and capacity characteristics in order to determine their impact on IT services. With an understanding of the factors that affect the demand for IT services, you'll be able to determine the right capacity to achieve desired service levels and optimize the use of IT resources.
IT growth projections cover a range of metrics, including the growth in the number and/or utilization of various aspects of the IT infrastructure. This may include applications, servers, users, transactions, networks, staff, space, and environmentals. For example, server projections may be based on planned growth rates, square feet per cabinet, servers per cabinet, and cabinets per square feet of data center space. Network projections may include bandwidth projections based on sales forecasts for new customers and servers, and bandwidth for growing existing customers.