Is a lack of control over non-production environments the most expensive mistake when managing software environments?

In this short blog, we cover:

1. The Challenge of Efficient Environment Management Tools
2. Research Findings of the Actual Costs
3. How to save $10,000 per release

How much is poor environment management really costing you?

Your teams may be using top-notch environment management tools for your test and production environments. Others are not so fortunate, with everything locked away in decentralised local spreadsheets and emails.

As you can imagine, this makes efficiency and version control a nightmare that often leads to configuration gaps causing important delays in the software delivery.

Yet, managing your environment landscape well is business-critical: You may need hundreds (sometimes thousands!) of environments to satisfy the many applications that today’s agile development needs.

Without a central source of truth, this can be time-consuming in the extreme – and cost your organisation literally millions every year.

The Challenge of Efficient Environment Management

Anyone whose business relies on software development must be familiar with the number of resources that all need to be managed efficiently.

The complexity rarely scales well. More applications need more environments, but also more environment management.

“Yet 95% of organisations have no idea what their environments look like.”

You’re likely to need more than one environment for each application: Imagine that you want to test a new feature before using it for Production; you’ll need to run it in an isolated Test Environment first.

Researchers from the Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) asked Test Environment Management (TEM) users to rank their top three challenges. 

The top three were:

1. Implementing automated test environments (29%)
2. Lack of visibility into test environment inventory and availability (22%)
3. Configuration drift (19%)

Test cycles can be delayed by weeks (and sometimes months!) – often due to inefficient production environments that are not fit for purpose.

The trend is clear: With the number of environments constantly increasing, centralization is more important than ever.

The True Cost of Environment Tools Mismanagement

EMA research shows that the true cost of inefficient environment management for the average enterprise in the survey is 1.4 million dollars per year (for only 76 production releases per year).

That hits your company’s bottom line hard.

The good news is that environment and Jira release management tools (such as Apwide Golive) can reduce the time it takes to provision environments from 3.3 days to just 1.8. days: Saving up to $864 per environment.

That means – for an organisation using an average of 188 environments – you could save over $128,000 per year.

In addition, the EMA research shows that efficient environment management can help you:

• Reduce the time it takes for applications to arrive in Production by up to five weeks.
• Save up to $10,000 per release in staff overheads.
• Improve application quality – resulting in a smaller help desk – with average savings of nearly $2,500 per release.

That means the long-term gains of implementing efficient environment management far outweighs the short-term cost.

Conclusion

The biggest cost associated with environment management is the effect it has on your critical resources. It hits the bottom line of how well your organisation performs for your customers, and your employees.

Any growing company will have a growing need for more and more environments. The sooner you align, centralise, and effectively manage the ones that you have, the sooner you’ll make that growth flexible, scaleable, and repeateable.

Measuring your current environment management efforts is the first step. The second is deciding on the right environment and release management tool for you.

If you haven’t yet calculated how much environment mismanagement is costing you, get in touch and we’ll talk you through it.

Whether you’re running your Jira instance on Server, or Data Center, Try Apwide Golive now in a live demo playground environment, and see how it could help.

So, what do you think? Could you save money on your environment management tools?