This is a guest blog post by Brad Casemore, Research Vice President, Datacenter Networks, IDC. Connect with him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Even as the post-pandemic world has become infinitely more complex, enterprise IT departments are confronted with a perennial complication: IT budgets are constrained — flat or decreasing rather than growing. It’s a seemingly intractable problem, but there are actions you can take to get the most from finite budgets.

In our two preceding blog posts, we examined, respectively, the implications and requirements associated with the COVID-driven work-from-home (WFH) phenomenon and how best to accommodate the “next normal” of the hybrid workforce. Those are changes that will be with us well into the future, and they necessitate the adoption of new technologies and solutions that entail enterprise expenditures.

The resulting challenge is daunting: How do you provide the infrastructure that supports the new reality of the hybrid workforce and increasingly distributed cloud applications within a fixed budget that refuses to make allowances for your additional needs? Doing more with less has always been an IT mantra, but it’s a bigger challenge when the world has been upended and unforeseen requirements have taken center stage.

Nevertheless, there are measures you can take to make the best of the hand you’ve been dealt. What follows are IDC’s recommendations for IT cost optimization relating to application delivery infrastructure.

  • Audit existing network, security, management, and analytics/visibility tools to ensure that they are still fit for purpose in a changed environment. Each platform or tool that you own carries two types of costs: one related to the price of procuring and refreshing it, and another relating to its management and maintenance. There is no free lunch, and there are no free tools. Even open-source tools carry costs associated with care and feeding, and a useful tool can lose its utility if requirements change or a proficient staff member — the one who actually know how to use it — leaves the organization. A comprehensive audit will invariably provide opportunities for you to reduce costs by consolidating your tool set.
  • Help tool consolidation efforts go further by maintaining or procuring tools that are multipurpose in nature. IDC has found that enterprises looking to move beyond the current crisis want to make investments in more integrated management of networking and security. This aim makes perfect sense when one considers that the network is an increasingly effective mechanism for defining and enforcing security policy wherever business takes place. In fact, this issue topped the charts in answers to two questions featured in IDC’s Enterprise Networking: Emergence of The New Normal Survey, conducted at the end of 2020. When asked which areas required enhanced tools for supporting remote workers, more than 35 percent of respondents identified extending consistent application and security policies to remote workers. Moreover, about 32 percent identified “more integrated network and security management” as the most important COVID-driven change to network operations that will become permanent within their organizations.
  • Automate extensively. Ensure that your tools support automation because that’s how you will achieve operational agility and greater operational efficiency. What’s more, automation, when done correctly, also contributes to improved user experience and better business outcomes. A growing number of organizations recognize the power of network automation. In IDC’s recent survey, about 34 percent of respondents indicated they were making increased use of automation tools since the onset of COVID-19 to enable improved user onboarding, service activation, and remote maintenance.
  • Go beyond automation by adopting technologies and tools that are simple to deploy and operate throughout the life cycle, from Day 0 through Day 2/N. Automated simplicity should not mean having to settle for subpar features and functionality. IDC advises that organizations seek out automated solutions that are flexible and extensible, offering no compromise between agility and control.
  • Consider cloud-delivered and cloud-managed offerings wherever possible. Cloud-delivered management and operations provide added agility and operational simplicity, boosting efficiency by eliminating costs and processes (firmware updates, and patches, among others) that are necessary but do not directly contribute to business outcomes and results. In IDC’s survey, 51 percent of respondents said they were making accelerated investments in cloud-managed networking as a result of COVID-19. Like many, they perceive the convenience and value that cloud-delivered platforms can provide.

Those suggestions, as well as perpetual vigilance to emerging requirements, will put you and your team in position to stretch your IT budget through optimized investments and utilization of increasingly critical application-delivery infrastructure.