IT tips for mid-size organisations

Mid-size organisations exist in an odd part of the budget spectrum: they have significantly more difficult IT burdens to bear than smaller organisations, but they don’t quite have the expansive budgets that a larger organisation might have to deal with such problems.

According to Gartner, there are three new technologies that IT departments in mid-size organisations should focus on in order to reduce IT labour and help compete with organisations that do have the money to throw around.

1. Data discovery business intelligence (BI) tools

Gartner reckons that many mid-size enterprises have a tough time moving beyond the most simple of data analytics and reporting. These programs tend to require business analysts, database administrators and report writers, and most mid-size organisations don’t have these lying around.

This is a problem because organisations that involve such analytics in their decision making outperform those that don’t, according to the firm’s research into its mid-market clients.

But ‘discovery-style’ tools might be the answer for these organisations. They “provide an agile solution to gather and model data from disparate sources, without the complexity of traditional BI and data warehouse deployments”, a report from the firm said.

Such tools allow end users to do their own analytics; you get the benefits of BI without giving up the man-hours of your IT department.

Gartner notes that these tools aren’t a replacement for data warehousing, but instead “a more agile way of creating data warehouses”, and can be used as prototypes for more formal data warehouse systems.

Potential vendors include, but are not limited to, Qliktech, Tableau Software and Tibco.

2. WLAN managed services

With more and more employee devices leaping onto the corporate network as part of BYOD programs, and more companies looking to throw fleets of tablets onto the network, many organisations are finding their WLANs are struggling to keep up with the demands of these new devices. And again, many mid-size enterprises simply don’t have the spare IT staff to devote to upgrading, scaling and managing the WLAN.

Managed WLAN services can help in these circumstances. With such a service, IT can hand off the day-to-day management of its WLAN to an outside company. This can include handling connectivity faults, configuration issues and maintenance. Often it’s done remotely - the third party will use software that allows their engineers to monitor and administer your network from a remote location, meaning that after installation, you won’t have their staff traipsing around your office.

Gartner recommends that mid-size enterprises consider these WLAN managed services as they can free up in-house IT staff for more important projects that “make the business better”.

3. Thin provisioning and other storage efficiency technologies

Broadly speaking, thin provisioning is the use of virtualisation to provide resources - like disk space - to multiple tasks as needed, rather than supply a big block of resources to each task up front. This latter form of provisioning tends to be wasteful, as it almost always allocates more resources than are required overall. Thin provisioning is thus generally more efficient.

But according to Gartner’s stats, as of January 2013, more than half (53%) of North American mid-size organisations “currently have no business need, will never use or are not aware of thin provisioning”. This is despite the general need for mid-size organisations to maximise their IT efficiency.

In the coming years, smarter ways of managing storage will become mandatory, Gartner reckons.

“Technologies like data deduplication and thin provisioning that can optimise storage utilisation will become commonplace ‘checklist’ requirements for most major storage purchases over the next three years. These technologies can reduce capital and operating expenses, and improve performance and utilisation rates if properly implemented,” the Gartner report read.

The firm recommends that mid-size organisations evaluate thin provisioning and implement it for “at least some storage needs”. It can be useful if you’re implementing desktop or server virtualisation, which increase storage capacity needs, Gartner said.

But thin provisioning is not fit for every scenario, the firm warned: you must determine which of your specific applications, if any, are suitable for the technology.

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