Uptime, downtime, business continuity, cost, productivity and thousands more of such adjectives are the ones that we in the IT world have to hear on a daily basis. Customers or end users expect high uptime and boards expect reduced IT investments without compromising on the productivity.
Today productivity has become a serious issue and it needs to be handled with efficiency. So, how do we manage IT infrastructure efficiently?
Before that we must be clear about what efficient IT management is. Nowadays, there are so many solution vendors in the market. As an end user, you may be confused about the vendor you want to buy a solution from.
The challenges that you may face in IT management include:
? Aligning IT with business: Not long ago, businesses started depending heavily on IT. Now with the current economic situation, businesses have undergone a paradigm shift with higher demands and changing consumer behaviour. IT processes at the backend have a lot more to do than just being available. With changing businesses, IT too, has to become dynamic to align itself to the environment. There is more data, than ever, to process and more complexities to simplify.
? Managing the rate of change: Now to compliment the change in business we have seen a dramatic shift in IT infrastructure as well. New technologies are now space efficient, power efficient and business driven. The challenge here is to manage these changes in technology. Today all of them sit in silos where they lack the visibility of Real IT. Applications, servers, network devices and databases are all various divisions of IT infrastructure. The question is that is it necessary to manage them in silos? If, not how else?
? Budget: Well this has been an eternal challenge, which like any other issue, gets stronger with time. We all know that the IT budget is shrinking and with recession looming around the corner, budgets will just get tighter. So is it efficient to manage your IT infrastructure in silos with several tools or with multiple vendors?
I guess it’s time for me to come out of an overly-cynical mode to see how things can be improved to overcome the challenges mentioned above. How about a tool which will combine all the silos together? A tool which will see IT infrastructure as a single entity? A tool which is not a combination of several loosely-integrated tools? A tool which will bring IT operations and Service management under a single console?
Such a tool can bring about efficiency in the following ways:
? IT managers and CIOs will be able to access a single dashboard to view and decide the Real IT.
? IT administrators will not have to monitor several tools. They will have just one tool to manage everything.
? Service providers will be able to manage service-level agreements (SLAs) more accurately as monitoring and ticketing comes from a single dashboard.
? Tools will come from a single vendor and enhance the support-and-troubleshooting response rate as compared to getting responses from multiple vendors.
? Budgets will be under control when compared to maintaining multiple tools even from single or mult
iple vendors.
Silos definitely aren’t the answer to efficient IT management; Integrated IT Management is.
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Thanks for reading,
Suvish
