How Much is Inefficient Environment Management Costing You?

by David Berclaz // Last updated on December 11, 2023  

Blog Inefficient Environment Management

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

In this short blog, we cover: 

  • The Challenge of Efficient Environment Management Tools, 
  • Research Findings of the Actual Costs, 
  • 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.

Jira Test Environment Release Managment Apwide Golive 1

Unless you’re Chuck Norris, you’re going to want a testing environment.

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

The top three were:

  • Implementing automated test environments (29%)
  • Lack of visibility into test environment inventory and availability (22%)
  • 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.

Jira Environment Release Integration With Jenkins Docker Gitlab And Teamcity

Jira integrates with many tools through Apwide Golive

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.

Plutora Tem Cost Savings Based Number Of Annual Production Releases 1024X434 1

Plutora shared the following chart predicting potential TEM driven cost savings based on the number of annual production releases.

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

In conclusion, effective environment management is crucial for optimizing the utilization of critical resources, ultimately impacting an organization's performance, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement. As a company expands, its demand for diverse environments increases, emphasizing the importance of aligning, centralizing, and efficiently managing existing environments. This will facilitate sustainable, scalable, and consistent growth.

The initial step in this process is to evaluate your current environment management strategies, followed by selecting the most suitable environment and release management tool tailored to your needs. It is essential to assess the costs associated with environment mismanagement and determine potential savings. Our team is available to guide you through this evaluation.

Regardless of whether your Jira instance operates on Data Center or Cloud, we invite you to experience Golive for free and discover how it can enhance your environment management processes. So, are you ready to explore the potential savings and benefits of implementing effective environment management tools?

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Transform your Test Environment Management with Apwide Golive:

  • Never hunt for environment info again,
    it's all in Jira where your team already is!
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    and hello to seamless test campaigns and demos
  • Keep your inbox organized,
    by choosing the environment notifications you need via email, MS Teams or Slack
  • Streamline your environment planning,
    with easy drag-and-drop on an intuitive timeline

Leading companies have already Golive as part of their DevOps toolchain:

Southwest Airlines Company
Mercedes-Benz Company
Manulife Financial Corporation Is A Canadian Multinational Insurance Company And Financial Services Provider.
Sky Television Company
Barclays Bank

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About the author

David Berclaz

After working for large organizations like Deloitte and Nestlé Nespresso, David co-founded Apwide in order to help organizations improve their Test Environment Management processes.

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