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Businesses are currently contending with an unpredictable and perilous working environment, and the line between success and survival is thinner than ever before. The situation worsens if your business is in the SMB category and being able to provide your organization with the technological agility to overcome likely obstacles becomes even more crucial.

This is where your data centre comes in. Your business needs to project a constantly connected presence and instigate continuous innovation. It is your data centre that drives both of these processes.

Having concluded a recent customer survey, HP now estimates that 70 percent of technology spending is consumed by management, maintenance, routine upgrades, migrations, and energy costs. Being able to tip the balance away from maintaining toward innovating can empower a business to increase its ability to take advantage of opportunities not previously available to them.

For SMBs, forward thinking to enable improvements to your systems cannot happen before more pressing concerns are addressed. Questions like: How do I maximize returns on existing technology assets? How do I lower my cost of operations? How do I drive rapid change with existing resources and staff? Interestingly, these are some of the same challenges that larger enterprises face, but as Ron Silliman, principal research analyst, Gartner, Inc. puts it, "For businesses with small- to midsize data centers that have economy-impacted budgets and limited staff, these challenges are amplified."

There are steps you can take that can allow you to optimize existing infrastructure to increase computing power and lower energy costs. As Silliman points out, "Organizations should take a whole-environment approach to operational efficiency to reduce risk and drive better business outcomes." The method should be a holistic, innovation-oriented way of thinking about how technology can best support the business.

Improve Operational Efficiency and Provide Constant Reliability

Speed and efficiency are highly valued in today's technology environment, but many data centers are engines put together with parts of varied origins, resulting in off-timing and a loss of performance. To simplify management of this multi-vendor engine, you need to gain broader visibility across the environment and the support functions.

You can start with intelligent monitoring services that provide continuous remote monitoring, diagnostics, and problem prevention while automating manual processes and reducing human error. There are opportunities to integrate support service contracts into one environment-wide service agreement, with a single point of management for all supplier contracts and service-level agreements.

Increasing Computing Capacity and Lowering Energy Costs

Value assessment services provide analysis across all aspects of the data centre ÔÇô building and technology ÔÇô to identify opportunities for boosting performance, reducing risks and cutting operating costs.

The views expressed are those of the author. This article has been edited for publication