According to Wikipedia, capacity management ensures “that information technology resources are sufficient to meet upcoming business requirements cost-effectively.” This sound to me like capacity management only looks at the IT resources, like CPU processing, memory and storage availability. Sure, when there is no capacity left on these resources, the chances are that your business will be interrupted and your IT staff has to figure out what caused it. But capacity management is much more than just IT resouces. It also encompasses human resources, offices and other facilities. Even if you would have all the IT resources in the world, you probably can’t do anything without your employees or providing them adequate workspaces.
How
The first thing we need to do is understand what thrives your business. With other words: why does your business exists? To support this business case, you need resources. The key here is to balance the costs of resources against the profit your getting from the business case. A Business Risk Analyses can help in providing this balance between the usage and required resources. Ideally you want a minimum overcapacity, but not to much.
In order to notice when your resources are running out, you need to monitor. For IT systems, there are plenty of tooling available. From free and open source to payware. For office or workplace resources there are Workplace Management systems available. And for human resources there are multiple HR management frameworks out there.
Next is to tune your IT systems so that the resources available are used as efficiently as possible. Using stress-tests you can confirm that your resources can handle certain loads. When using cloud services like Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS or Google Cloud, depending on your setup, you might be able to automate resource availability, meaning additional resources are automaticly added or removed when required.
Management should plan the needed resources as much as possible. When you are planning to promote your website to possible customers or via an advertising campaign, you can expect an increase in visitors to this website. Make sure that your IT department is aware of your planning so they can make sure there are enough recources available.
Additional tips
- You need to remove stuff that you don’t need, as removing document or files can free up a lot of disk space.
- Dispose hardcopies to free up shelving space.
- Hire (temporary) personnel when needed
- Acquire sufficient IT systems and components or use Cloud services to rent these resources
- Remove software, database or entire environment when you don’t need them anymore.
- Optimize your scheduled jobs, making sure they are not in each others way
- Restrict bandwidth for resource consuming applications or services if these are not part of your critical processes.
Risks
The main risk when looking at capacity management is to make sure you have plenty. But as stated before, you don’t want to overdoo it because that would be a waste of money. Plan your capacity as much as possible.
Depending on your business, when hiring temporary personnel, make sure that they have the same credentials and agreements as your own personell performing the same job, like criminal background checks or non-disclosure agreements.
Example Control Ruleset
When the following controls are used, you should be compliant for this topic:
- Systems are tuned and monitored for availability and efficiency
- Stress tests are performed regulary for all critical systems and applications
- Capacity planning is part of any project
- Resources (files, applications, servers, etc) not needed anymore are removed
- Software code under own development is optimized to prevent excessive load on systems
- Bandwidth limitations are set for each system
Related links
Gartner on IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools
Gartner on Integrated Workplace Management Systems
Microsoft Azure Resource Manager
AWS Capacity Reservations for EC2
Google Cloud Resource Manager
