Case in point: virtualization. For many companies, virtualization can and does save money. For many others, it is the wrong decision. Companies see virtualization as a continuation of the path they are on. They keep their servers in-house, under their IT team's management, only the servers are virtualized. They see the savings in hardware and footprint (power and HVAC).

Many companies, however, neglect to plan for the full cost. Virtualization, literally and figuratively, adds a layer of complexity to the network and systems environment. Companies see the hardware savings and forget to consider the cost of the tools necessary to manage the virtualized environments to company needs. So too, they neglect to consider the cost of up skilling IT staff, changes to storage systems, upgrades to backup/recovery systems, changes needed in disaster recovery plans and testing, and, in some cases, the cost of properly licensing the operating systems.

Without a critical mass in the number of servers and/or storage systems being virtualized, the cost to create, manage, and support virtualization can far outpace the hardware and footprint savings.

IT Inertia tells companies that virtualized servers are in-house servers, only better. Taking a step back and honestly looking at alternatives can lead to real and significant savings.

As an example, choosing the right hosted communications service can reduce the cost of email, calendar, and contacts by 60% to 80% over in-house systems, while cutting total downtime per month by 50% to 75%.

And yet, businesses may be hesitant to make the move. Some companies mention security concerns -- even while the hosted service's security far outshines the company's own efforts. Others site reliability -- even while the hosted service has measurably better availability and reliability than the company's own systems.

These concerns are often fronts for the real issue -- IT Inertia. Too many players have a stake in continuing with the status quo. Help these players identify their value with the alternatives, gain acceptance, and manage IT costs.

How You Save: Properly managing email services, virus protection, and compliance is time consuming. Email systems also require capital expenditures for infrastructure -- servers, storage, operating systems, client access licenses, etc. Moving to a managed, integrated, hosted service, you offload the majority of the administrative tasks and change to a "pay as you go" model. Costs drop as you leverage the infrastructure and expertise of the service.

Online Backup Services: Most companies do not accurately calculate the cost of their backup/recovery systems. Beyond the hardware, software, and maintenance contracts, your backup/recovery system should include periodic media replacements, off-site storage services, recovery testing, and the administrative time necessary to make sure that backups run correctly and recovery will work. Online backup services deliver secure off-site backups. Better services let you maintain a local copy of the backup for faster restores and continuous data protection capabilities your in-house system cannot provide. The best services can deliver secure, encrypted vaults that let you rebuild systems at local network speed.

How you save: Best-of-breed online backup services charge you only for the storage you use in the vault. With compression and reverse incremental technologies, this may be a fraction of your live (or raw) disk space. You no longer pay for hardware, software, maintenance, or media. As important, your administration (soft) costs plummet.

Collaboration Tools: Simple, easy-to- navigate, easy-to-search collaboration tools allow employees to organize and share information with endless chains of email. Information is hosted centrally and while it may be organized, search facilities make location less important than content.

How you save: An IDC report cited by Storage Magazine noted that users spend 25% of their time finding information. Cut search time by 20% and you get a 5% improvement in employee productivity. Sharing documents instead of routing copies by email dramatically reduces email server load and disk space requirements. Pick the right tool, and you can collaborate internally, or securely with customers, without hiring or contracting programmers and experts.

Still in beta, OffiSync is a MS Office add-on that lets you use Google Docs to save and share documents created in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. The OffiSync menu (or ribbon in Office 2007) mimics the file menu, using Google Docs instead of local disk to save and manage documents.

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