Improve infrastructure spend and efficiency with hybrid IT

To remain competitive in a digital business landscape, organizations must find opportunities to promote growth, control costs, and improve efficiencies. Ensuring the availability of the IT environment that supports the business is critical to achieving these goals. However, the behind-the-scenes efficiency of the IT infrastructure is equally important.

The Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study conducted by Forrester Consulting provided some key insights and quantified benefits on the financial impact and operational efficiencies achieved by migrating to a Flexential hybrid IT solution. These improvements included increased uptime and customer retention, which together enhanced revenue and a series of efficiencies and cost savings that supported growth.

To help frame the potential of a Flexential deployment, Forrester assimilated the data, metrics and experiences of the participating organizations into a composite organization to deliver an aggregate financial analysis.

The challenges of business growth

Like many businesses, the participating organizations were managing large, costly legacy infrastructures that experienced frequent outages and performance issues. Rapid growth—achieved both organically and through mergers and acquisitions—also proved to be an issue. Not only did organizations struggle to scale the space, power, and cooling required to support mounting compute demands, but they also struggled to quickly procure new hardware.

Organizations that grew through acquisitions were also managing multiple independent IT environments or attempting to integrate these environments. These strained resources drove up operational costs and introduced numerous inefficiencies.

Flexential solutions establish efficiencies and drive down costs

The Flexential hybrid IT environment allowed organizations to leverage leading-edge technologies, best practices, and data center expertise to address these issues and achieve the agility to keep pace with business needs. In addition to uptime and customer retention improvements, these capabilities contributed to a 48% return on investment (ROI), a $2.1 million net present value (NPV), and a 19-month payback period. The composite organization also achieved three-year IT administration efficiency gains of $1.4 million.

Data center exit accelerated by 56%

Operating an inefficient data center environment is expensive. Whether the inefficiencies are grounded in underperforming systems, frequent outages, siloed environments, or another issue, they can escalate costs and pull IT resources away from other key initiatives. The longer an organization remains operating in this state, the greater the financial burden. However, a data center migration can be long and arduous, especially for organizations without experience.

Partnering with Flexential allowed organizations to supplement their internal IT teams with seasoned professionals experienced in data center migrations. These skilled resources accelerated data center exit by 56% and delivered a three-year present value (PV) of $367,000 during that period.

Operational efficiency increased by 50%

Transitioning a legacy environment to a best-in-class facility requires more than simply moving equipment. Organizations should approach the migration as an opportunity to modernize the environment and rectify any issues that can affect performance and compound operating costs.

Flexential offers the expertise and best practices to help organizations build cutting-edge, highly scalable solutions that simplify the existing environment and its applications. By consolidating the environment, Flexential eliminated expenses for managing multiple environments, licensing redundant software, and powering and cooling underutilizing hardware. Newly automated processes delivered additional efficiencies and savings over time.

This optimized environment increased operational efficiency by 50%.

Infrastructure management efficiency improved by 50%

Most organizations do not want to be in the data center management business. Ongoing data center management is time-consuming, especially for IT teams juggling other business-enabling IT responsibilities.

Flexential hybrid IT environments allowed organizations to offload data center management tasks to Flexential and devote that time to other critical projects. One study participant noted that Flexential allowed his organization to avoid hiring four new employees. Another organization gained back 20% of its IT team’s time by avoiding patch and volume management responsibilities.

By supplementing internal IT resources with Flexential Professional Services, organizations were able to address emerging challenges more quickly than before—from integrating new acquisitions and scaling the environment to address evolving needs to redistributing some workloads to the cloud to strengthen agility. These IT enhancements required a level of expertise that many organizations did not have on staff.

In sum, these efforts halved both operational efficiency and the number of required full-time IT administrators.

Infrastructure spending reduced by 10%

Operating a data center is expensive by anyone’s standards, and growth inevitably leads to additional infrastructure spend. Flexential offers access to enterprise-grade hardware and software at substantially lower costs than organizations could negotiate on their own. It can also help organizations reduce procurement time. For organizations that grow through acquisitions, integrating additional infrastructure into an existing environment is complex, and until the IT integration is complete, the organizations must manage multiple environments with unique vendors and software.

By consolidating environments, decommissioning legacy data centers, eliminating unnecessary or redundant software subscriptions, simplifying the management of the environment and its vendors, and moving core applications to the cloud, Flexential helped organizations achieve significant savings. These savings can continue to grow as organizations transition more workloads to the cloud.

These improvements resulted in a 10% decrease in infrastructure spending and a three-year PV of $646,000.

Growth accelerated

Business success relies on continued growth. By utilizing a dynamic hybrid IT solution, organizations avoid the obstacles associated with private facilities, such as lengthy capacity-planning cycles, unresponsive partners, and limited physical space in their facilities.

Flexential’s flexible data center and cloud solutions offer the space to support rapid growth and the timely procurement of additional resources. Its staff is also dedicated to a collaborative process designed to build long-lasting partnerships. One survey participant said, “Flexential has allowed us to grow our business by supporting us with the resources we need.”

Ultimately, this results in an improved time-to-market, which can strengthen revenue, the customer experience, and business growth.

Conclusion

As businesses continue to develop and deliver innovative products and services, the ability to maintain an efficient environment that minimizes costs and allows IT resources to remain focused on business-critical IT initiatives is essential for success. Flexential hybrid IT solutions have been proven to improve efficiencies by delivering a modern environment that allows organizations to seamlessly scale space, power, cooling, and bandwidth. Complemented by a powerful partnership, Flexential hybrid IT solutions improve the speed and ease with which organizations conduct business and support their growth into the future.

Read the full Forrester TEI report here.