Infrastructure teams are being asked to do more than ever.
Support growth. Absorb variability. Enable modernization. Deliver predictable recovery outcomes. And do all of it without increasing operational complexity or overcommitting budget.
The problem isn’t effort or expertise. It’s the model.
For years, capacity planning in hybrid environments has relied on a simple premise: build enough infrastructure to cover your worst day. Peak demand. Full recovery. Unexpected growth. Audit-driven testing. If you own enough capacity, you’ll be safe.
But today’s environment doesn’t reward static safety margins. It punishes idle spend and slow response times. Variability is no longer the exception—it’s the operating condition.
The result? Overbuilding has become the default strategy.
The cost of playing it safe
Most infrastructure leaders don’t overprovision because they want to. They do it because uncertainty is punished more harshly than inefficiency.
If demand spikes unexpectedly, or a recovery event requires more capacity than planned, the consequences are immediate and visible. Idle infrastructure, by contrast, is a slow, quiet cost—easier to justify than a failed test or a missed RTO.
So, teams hedge. They add a buffer. They carry excess capacity “just in case.”
Over time, that buffer becomes the baseline.
The challenge is that this model was designed for a more predictable world—one with longer provisioning cycles, stable workloads, and fewer sudden shifts in business priorities. Today, infrastructure must respond to seasonal spikes, M&A activity, modernization efforts, cyber events, and compressed timelines.
Static overprovisioning can’t keep up without becoming economically unsustainable.
From capacity planning to capacity readiness
There’s a meaningful shift underway.
Instead of asking, “How much infrastructure should we own?” forward-looking teams are asking, “How ready can we stay without overbuilding?”
This is the difference between ownership and readiness.
Ownership focuses on possessing enough capacity at all times to feel safe. Readiness focuses on assured access to capacity when it matters—without carrying it permanently.
Capacity readiness means:
- Designing environments around realistic day-to-day demand
- Ensuring predictable performance and validated recovery objectives
- Enabling access to additional capacity when growth, testing, or disruption requires it
- Maintaining cost control without sacrificing confidence
This shift reframes elasticity as well.
For many enterprises, elasticity isn’t about infinite scale. It’s about achieving specific outcomes when conditions change—validating a recovery plan, absorbing a workload spike, enabling a modernization initiative—without redesigning the environment or introducing unpredictable cost.
In that sense, elasticity becomes intentional and governed, not automatic and opaque.
Defining capacity readiness in hybrid IT
Hybrid IT adds another layer of complexity.
Infrastructure spans on-premises environments, colocation facilities, private cloud platforms, and public cloud services. Each has different cost structures, performance characteristics, and operational constraints.
Traditional DR models often assume worst-case sizing. Testing becomes disruptive or infrequent. Procurement cycles introduce friction. Meanwhile, executive expectations around uptime and resilience continue to rise.
Capacity readiness in hybrid environments requires more than adding hardware or shifting workloads. It requires rethinking how capacity is planned, accessed, and validated across environments—so that resilience doesn’t require permanent overbuild.
A practical question for IT leaders
If your team had to execute a full recovery test tomorrow—or respond to an unexpected spike in demand—what would be the biggest constraint?
Process? People? Or capacity?
If capacity is the limiting factor, the conversation may not be about scaling faster. It may be about designing readiness differently.
The goal isn’t to eliminate risk. It’s to remove the assumption that safety requires idle infrastructure.
Join the conversation
Join our webinar, where we’ll explore this shift in more detail: Scaling without overbuilding: The new capacity readiness playbook for hybrid IT
In this session, Chris Smith and I unpack:
- Why traditional capacity and DR models are breaking down
- What capacity readiness looks like in a hybrid world
- How IT leaders are balancing flexibility, predictability, and cost control
- Real-world use cases for growth, testing, and recovery scenarios
- And how new approaches, including our Capacity on Demand offering, are helping organizations stay ready without permanent overbuild
If your team is navigating variability, compressed timelines, or rising resilience expectations, this conversation is for you.
Kayse Horton
Product Manager, Data Protection
