High costs are incurred if you use applications in your company that are de facto not permanently needed by users to the same extent, but only in certain phases. The required IT infrastructure generates high fixed costs because its dimensions are based on the peak load – and therefore do not need to be used for the rest of the time, but must still be maintained. If resources are too scarce, however, the annoyance is particularly great at peak times for users because information technology is not available.
For example, a seasonal production system or the accounting software, with which the invoice run is always created at the end of the month. The same applies to your development and test environment, which you need before the rollout of new functionalities of your business-critical ERP application to be on the safe side: Here, too, the demand for the necessary IT resources fluctuates strongly.