With limited IT resource, small businesses may need to focus on the support processes which will add the most value against the time invested. Dependent on the criticality of your systems I would suggest that managing system capacity (or Capacity Management) is one area that may be beneficial. As well as this we will also look at the following areas:

Capacity Planning
Application sizing
Capacity modeling

So to start off, let’s explain these terms:

Capacity Management: This is the process of making sure that system resources (whether it is disk space, memory requirements, network bandwidth etc.) are kept within acceptable limits. When breaches occur, capacity management is responsible to taking remedial action

Capacity Planning: This is the process that ensures future capacity requirements are considered based upon current usage, viewable trends and knowledge of business activity

Application sizing: This process considers any projects or initiatives you may have with regard to introducing new software or services to ensure that they fit on you current infrastructure

Capacity Modeling: A step on from capacity planning, this process is responsible for running the “what if” scenarios to see if risk areas (that may cause you capacity based service breaches) exist

The next entry on this subject will start to explain how this fits in with a SME and introduce some basic questions to review your current capacity management and capacity planning.