What Does IT Performance Really Mean?

IT is moving into the future, growing beyond its traditional role to become a centre of innovation – so then why are conversations about IT performance stuck in the past?

Even in today’s world of Digital Transformation the discussion is towards Quantitative performance metric – the hard numbers like processor class, memory size, disk I/O, network through put etc. The problem is that using these metrics to evaluate the performance of your IT – whether solutions, service providers or the organization itself – comes hopelessly short of determining the value that IT is bringing to its new task of leading digital transformation.

The quantitative metric is extremely important to measure technical performance. It is required to know if the underlying hardware is technically capable to power your application. The question “What does IT performance mean for the complex, interconnected, innovative IT organization of today and tomorrow?”

At the end of the day, each technical metric supports a greater business objective, whether that is fixing a problem or driving business transformation for an organization. The definition of IT performance must transcend “speeds and feeds” to encompass what technical performance enables your IT and your company to do, or in other words, how your IT is supporting your organization’s purpose.

That’s the true measure of value when it comes to IT. So how do you get there?

The Right Data Used in the Right Way

How is IT moving the needle for the organization? What tweaks can IT make to improve the performance of your applications? How can IT contribute more value to the business? The answers to these questions have to start with a focus on the right data and then be tied to how it actually impacts outcomes.

For any business or IT implementations measuring performance is of utmost importance. It is not important just to know the CPU, RAM, HDD etc. It all depends on how the whole cloud has been orchestrated to ensure that will enable better performance. Which is why not all clouds are equal.

For example, 99.999% uptime and ultra-low latency are certainly features of many high-performance IT solutions. But if it’s unclear to you why five 9s or shaving 10 milliseconds off your average latency matters, whether it even matters at all, or what it means for your applications and your business, then these numbers aren’t truly helping you make decisions about performance; they’re just numbers.

And with more technology than anyone could possibly use coming out at a rapid clip, understanding the data that matters to your applications and using it to decisively evaluate new tech becomes even more key.

High-Performance IT Solutions Create Room to Focus

All business today deal with massive amounts of data. It has become an essential part of any organization. Sooner the organization make data the core of their business decisions. The continuous process of evaluating and optimizing the performance of your IT solutions can begin.

The State of IT Infrastructure Management, nearly 8 in 10 IT pros believe they could bring more value to their organization if they spent less time on routine tasks like server monitoring and maintenance. Easiest way to achieve this is to outsource it to IT Solutions provider.

IT must be seen as a center of innovation to succeed. But that’s clearly a challenge given the time and effort devoted to routine tasks. The questions you need to ask yourself “How much more could your IT accomplish with the time you’re getting back by offloading those management tasks?“. When you know what tasks are holding value-added, purposeful work back, allocating resources to digital transformation and other mission-critical initiatives will only get easier.

Changing Expectations and Differentiated Performance

Hardware specs will always be state of art. It is safe to assume that in most of the cases compute power is beyond what applications can even use. Faster IT decision makers change their expectations faster will be the improved performance.

In this landscape, enterprise IT organizations aren’t just looking for performance. They’re looking for differentiated performance provided by the kind of products and services that can increase operational performance above and beyond other solutions—without adding time or complexity to IT organizations already stretched thin.

But it’s not just about services that other IT providers may not have; it’s about creating visibility and predictability and how that can unlock unrealized operational efficiency and better decision-making—just by taking things off our customers’ plates.

Technology is on the bleeding edge, but IT organizations aren’t necessarily in the same position. IT doesn’t have to be slow-moving. The sign of a high-performance IT solution or service provider is that they are enabling your organization to focus on what matters: agility, innovation, staying ahead of the rapidly developing technology and empowering your purpose.