What do environment optimisation projects consist of?
Environment optimisation projects are initiatives focused on improving the efficiency, performance and cost of technological infrastructure.
The main objective is to eliminate waste, reduce complexity, modernise components and ensure that resources are scaled and aligned with actual business needs.
What are your main strategies?
I typically work with five main lines:
Rightsizing and rationalisation: adjusting the capacity of machines, storage, and services according to their actual use.
Consolidation of workloads: grouping services and redistributing loads to reduce hosts, licences, and consumption.Technological modernisation: migration to newer versions, managed services, or cloud-native architectures. Automation and intelligent operation: scripts, pipelines, active monitoring, and automated repetitive processes.Decommissioning: eliminating obsolete or underutilised components, reducing risk, complexity, and expense.
What are the benefits?
The benefits are clear for both IT and the business:
- Direct reduction in OPEX and CAPEX (lower consumption, licences, hosting, and storage).
- Improved performance and stability, with cleaner and more consistent environments.
- Enhanced security, as optimisation almost always involves eliminating obsolescence.
- Operational efficiency, with fewer incidents and less rework.
- Greater availability, thanks to more modern and resilient architectures.
What examples are there?
I can mention real examples from my recent experience:
- Redistribution of VMs between clusters to allow the removal of specific hosts, reducing costs and inefficiencies.
- NAS obsolescence project with more than 5 billion files, without incidents, with improved performance and significant OPEX savings.
- Migration of VMware environments to native Azure, reducing dependencies, modernising infrastructure and lowering costs.
- POCs of new technologies to enable more efficient, secure and scalable solutions.
- FinOps initiatives, identifying waste and implementing configuration adjustments for continuous savings.
What professional profiles are involved in this?
Environment optimisation is a multidisciplinary task that typically involves:
- Infrastructure and Cloud Architects, who define the strategy and target architecture.
- Infrastructure and Cloud Engineers, responsible for technical execution.
- FinOps Specialists, who analyse costs and recommend adjustments.
- DevOps/SRE, who automate, monitor, and improve resilience.
- Security specialists, to ensure compliance and risk reduction.
- Project managers, who coordinate deadlines, dependencies, and deliveries.
What impact do new technologies have on this?
New technologies greatly enhance optimisation projects.
For example:
- Hybrid cloud and native services allow you to scale automatically and pay only for what you use.
- AIOps and AI applied to operations predict consumption and recommend optimisations in real time.
- Infrastructure as code and advanced automation reduce errors and speed up deployments.
- Containers and Kubernetes improve density, performance, and portability.
- Intelligent storage enables deduplication, automatic compression, and tiering, reducing total cost.
- Advanced FinOps tools provide immediate visibility into waste, trends, and savings opportunities.
Together, these technologies enable much more streamlined, resilient, secure, and cost-effective environments.
