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When I started in IT ten years ago it was a very different place than it is today.  Windows 98 was bleeding edge for consumers and Windows 2000 was nipping at its heels.  I cut my teeth on NT 4.0 PDC/BDC to Active Directory migrations and ridding companies of the infamous Exchange 5.5.  Datacenters were vast with expensive cooling and payroll was sky high for the best and the brightest trained IT people.

Today the picture is much different.  At some point in the last ten years IT became “broke.”  Who is to blame for this?  IT staff? Corporate?  Whatever the reason, it’s broke, so let’s look at how it’s broken and what we can do to fix it:

Problem: Cost
Everything else in the world has gone down in price, but IT keeps going up.  The real cost isn’t in hardware and software though.  You can buy a desktop computer for less than $500 now.  The costs that continue to go up are datacenter, bandwidth, and energy.   Management is constantly fighting the battle of putting in more servers, more bandwidth and more power.  Some of these issues have been addressed with blade technology and virtualization, but they’re still a far cry from being in line with what they need to be.  If that’s not bad enough, labor costs continue to go up while maintaining onsite IT staff.

Problem: Complexity
Networks have not gotten easier to manage but harder.  IT staffs are consumed with trying to keep up and learn the latest networking protocols to keep with demand of the network.  Everything runs over the network now and it’s just going to get worse before it gets better.

Problem: Lifespan
With manufacturing or distribution you get a lifespan of nearly twenty years on your equipment.  That is a tremendous ROI!  In IT you don’t get nearly that.  What you put in today will be outdated within 3 years and at capacity within 5 years.

So how can a business compensate for this?

Solution: Cloud Computing & Outsourcing
Cloud computing is not a pipe dream anymore.  Depending on your business model, your company might easily adapt to cloud computing, managed server solutions, or SaaS.  You tremendously cut down on overhead by reducing payroll demands, capital expenditures for hardware, and reoccurring costs of energy, and bandwidth.   With the cloud computing or managed server solutions you are essentially making your service provider responsible for dealing with the ongoing costs of running a datacenter.  That’s ok though, because chances are your service provider is better at it than you anyway.  That’s why they’re in the business.