If you think that you already have these bases covered, you might want to think again and ask yourself five questions. How efficient is the storage that you're using to support your exponentially expanding databases? How much overtime is your database administrator (DBA) staff putting into managing servers and storage? How much are you spending on all that hardware in your data centers? What's the cost of the measures you put in place to make sure that your systems are available 24x7 and can grow with the business? And finally, how much are you spending on regulatory compliance? If any of this sounds familiar, you're not alone. This e-book by IBM, will introduce you to the five big IT budget killers and some of the best ways to knock them out.

Many of the largest IT budget problems can be traced back to five big money drains:

• Storage expansion
• System complexity
• Hardware sprawl
• Reliability and scalability
• Compliance