Given the ever-increasing criticality of IT to the business, the CIO that cannot deliver predictable performance, while minimizing cost will be replaced. Yet a number of trends are increasing the complexity of solving this problem. Moreover, organizations today vary in their level of IT maturity. The ability to adopt new technologies and processes, pressure from the business, as well as the beliefs and aspirations of CIOs all play a role in how and why organizations mature.

This document describes five stages of IT maturity for CIOs to understand where their organization is today and where they can aspire to reach:

1. Aware: Collect and review performance and cost metrics
2. Proactive: Proactively make changes to assure performance and control cost
3. Automated Management: Continuously assure performance within cost constraints
4. Demand Aligned: Auto scale apps and infrastructure based on real-time demand
5. SLA Delivery: Deliver differentiated service levels within cost and constraints

Adopting an autonomic IT approach requires a change in mindset across the organization. But whatever their stage of IT maturity, CIOs and their organizations can benefit. This document is your roadmap.

Capacity management as an operational discipline has existed since the advent of server-based computing, dating back to the age of the mainframe. Commercial tools to support this discipline have existed for more than 30 years with each successive generation of server platform creating its own unique requirements.

The introduction of virtualization in particular introduced the Intelligent Workload Management (IWM) problem where capacity management was no longer a sufficient solution to assuring application performance. In particular, traditional capacity management solutions suffer from a few shortcomings.

This whitepaper explores the traditional methods of managing capacity in the data center, the new approach IT must adopt to stay competitive and how you can assure application performance while scaling your infrastructure.

A growing number of IT leaders are transforming IT’s unfortunate reputation as a cost-center into one of a competitive advantage. In doing so they acknowledged that IT cannot be a gate-keeper. Their teams must enable applications teams to deliver on business needs—or they’ll be replaced. The public cloud promises many things, but there remain three key elements to consider as you transform IT: Performance, Cost, and Agility.

This white paper is for leaders of Operations, Engineering, or Infrastructure teams who are creating or executing an IT roadmap. It discusses the challenges that must be recognized and questions that must be considered in order to succeed in this new cloud era.