Security Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

The labor or labor equivalents (outsourced / contract labor) cost for running the data center operations for servers and storage systems. Tasks include: service desk, performance and availability management, user administration, OS support, break-fix management, software deployment, application management (provisioning and scheduling), systems management, disk and file management, storage management, security management, and database management and administration.

Administration tools include single point systems management, virtualization management, resource management, workload management, capacity advisory tools and integrated security features and practices.

To help address security efficiency and effectiveness, a growing cost in almost every enterprise, newly integrated security features such as identity management integration and a long list of enhanced / existing features such as security containment, Role-based Access Control, Encrypted Volume and File Systems, Host IDS, IP filtering, IPSec, Secure shell, Open SSL, Software Assistant, Bastille for security hardening and lockdown help to keep the cost of security management lower than competitive platforms.

Availability measures the time systems are up and available for computing. Non-availability is measured in unplanned downtime, and the business or productivity losses associated with system unavailability. The cost for downtime is measured as lost productivity for applications which support user functions, and lost business value and revenue for applications which support business transactions and key processes.

Availability is measured in three ways:

Planned downtime – outages caused by taking systems down for regular maintenance and upgrades.

Unplanned downtime – outages from hardware and software failures, data-loss, human errors, capacity issues, accessibility issues, and unacceptable response issues.

Security issues – a particular unplanned downtime caused by outages from security related issues such as virus, worm and Trojan attacks, denial of service, network intrusions, and data destruction events. Information losses such as the theft of trade secrets, credit information, and other business confidential information are not accounted for here. Business disruption insurance which may cover these acts is a cost of doing business and not an IT cost.

Agility, flexibility, and adaptability to handle changing business demands and requirements resulting in additional revenue and business opportunities such as that gained by industry standard technologies. Future-proofing investments from change, avoiding future asset or labor costs because the existing system can adapt and absorb change quickly without additional investment. Time to solution deployment comparisons for delivering productivity or revenue enhancing applications more quickly.

Moreover, using partitions, and security containment for application isolation and compartment inter-processing, the application demands and other business rules can drive scheduling and computing power allocation dynamically to optimize asset usage and reduce costs.