IT professionals responsible for maintaining smooth network operations and optimized application performance don’t get much downtime, so to speak. Budgets could be low and staff lean, but those factors simply exemplify the purpose of savvy IT management – do more with less. And in a lot cases, the mantra is now to manage new technologies better and deliver more services with the same resources. This year, IT managers will have plenty of new ground to cover while they work to deliver applications and services to a demanding end-user community.

Cloud computing: IT managers may not be the sole decision makers when it comes to choosing a cloud service or building a cloud environment. (And in some cases, they might be the last to know a business unit purchased cloud services.) But when business-critical applications move to the cloud, IT managers will be expected to report on the performance and explain why it could be lagging. Dynamic capacity management, chargeback and other IT management disciplines will also come into play when IT managers find themselves further along the path to adopting cloud. As companies determine the type of cloud services they want, the relationship they have with service providers and/or if they will build their own environment, various IT management needs will emerge and must be addressed. Industry experts would advise IT managers to be thinking of management before a decision is made, rather than making it an afterthought.

Virtualization: One may think that virtual systems management has been talked about for enough years that it has been mastered, but one would be wrong. Virtualization adoption has gone mainstream, but the degree to which IT managers can virtualize their environments is often limited by lack of management tools, technologies and even skills. Plus today’s virtual environments are becoming more heterogeneous in regard to hypervisors, and most IT managers have learned it doesn’t always make sense to manage the virtual realm separate from the physical boxes for which they are also responsible. IT managers will be looking to mature their approaches to managing virtual environments this year in an effort to broaden their scope and increase their ROI with the technology.