What does capacity planning aim to determine?

Capacity planning is a critical process in IT management focused on forecasting and assessing the future infrastructure requirements needed to maintain or improve system performance. This involves analyzing current resource utilization, predicting future demands based on trends or expected growth, and ensuring that the technology infrastructure can handle workloads efficiently without performance bottlenecks.

Effective capacity planning enables organizations to proactively address potential shortages in computing resources, storage, and network bandwidth, thus aligning the IT infrastructure with business needs and service level agreements. By determining the future needs for system performance, capacity planning helps in optimizing resources and ensuring that the IT environment can support organizational goals both in the short and long term.

In contrast, budget considerations for new equipment, staffing needs for IT support, and software application designs are relevant to the broader context of IT management but do not specifically address the essence of capacity planning. These aspects may come into play as part of the overall strategy but are separate from the primary objective of determining infrastructure requirements for efficient system performance.