White Paper. SAS IT Intelligence. Balancing enterprise strategy, business objectives, IT enablement and costs

Transcription

1 White Paper SAS IT Intelligence Balancing enterprise strategy, business objectives, IT enablement and costs

2 Contents Executive Summary... 1 How to Create and Exploit IT Intelligence... 1 SAS IT Intelligence: Establishing New Conversations... 2 Resource Optimization... 2 Financial Optimization... 4 Summary... 5

3 1 Executive Summary When IT investments don t produce the expected cost reductions, service levels or productivity improvements, frustration grows within the business units. That frustration often results in the question: What value does IT really provide, and could those same services be better provisioned elsewhere? For the sake of the business, and in accordance with several forms of government legislation, it is time for IT departments to get their arms around their true costs versus value, while becoming transparent with their service levels and resources. Business units question IT value when the linkages between business strategies and objectives to IT investments and financial performance are not evident. In many organizations, business and IT sit on opposite sides of a chasm that further conceal these linkages. On one side, executives and planners create enterprise strategy with business-unit objectives and then look to IT for technology enablement at a cost and service level that achieves business objectives. On the other side, IT creates and delivers services and technologies. In an effective organization, the IT strategy is created to accommodate those stated business objectives. In others, these business and IT activities are independent of one another. The chasm grows when IT is unable to illustrate its contribution, and the performance of those contributions, against stated business objectives. With business performance and the costs of doing business at stake, why are business and IT not yet aligned? While IT is responsible for implementing and maintaining systems and tools to enable business strategies, it seldom applies the same technology and resources to the business of IT. A look at the challenge of data management for IT reveals the crux of the problem. IT exists in an infrastructure of dissimilar infrastructure components and technical processes. Technical skills are grouped by infrastructure type to keep components functional. With components splintered and isolated by technical attributes, IT must employ niche tools to monitor infrastructure, collect data, apply metrics and respond to emergencies. How to Create and Exploit IT Intelligence When IT infrastructure performance data is embedded within technology silos, intelligence is limited to those silos. Without the ability to link diverse infrastructure assets into business planning and objectives, measured business results, service levels and financial results, IT operates within a narrow scope. There is no foundation (i.e., an IT performance database) from which to create and exploit IT intelligence. IT intelligence capabilities from SAS provide the common source of IT performance and capacity information that is the basis for aligning objectives with outcomes, forecasting results, and optimizing infrastructure, services and financial results to provide a holistic view. IT intelligence links technology silos, service processes and financial data for seamless performance. Most of all, IT intelligence provides hindsight to accurately review what has happened, insight to ascertain why it happened and foresight to enable IT to optimize the impact of technology on the organization. SAS IT Intelligence combines SAS expertise in data access and analysis with a set of unmatched capabilities for creating enterprise business intelligence. The first order of business for IT intelligence is getting past the perennial roadblock of disparate data sources, including IT infrastructure, transactional systems and financial sources. Without the ability to extract, transform and load infrastructure data on an enterprise scale and apply predictive analytics, insights into the operational effectiveness of IT infrastructure will be limited. SAS IT Resource Management delivers the capability to move past this roadblock. As a result, complete visibility into the infrastructure is often trapped in niche tools and provides little intelligence for planning. This means that IT service and management processes are sometimes ad hoc. For the IT organization, it is frustrating because processes tend to be reactive instead of proactive, generally inefficient and error-prone, resulting in higher costs, messy data and poor alignment within IT itself, let alone with the lines of business. Figure 1: SAS IT Resource Management client.

4 2 SAS IT Intelligence provides solutions for optimizing resources, services and finance: Resource optimization enables organizations to analyze and predict resource requirements based on future business demands and constraints. Using SAS IT Resource Management, IT performance data may be consolidated from any source across the enterprise. SAS Analytics is then used to profile and optimize the distribution of business-critical applications and workloads to streamline the delivery of services. Financial optimization offers a solution for developing and maintaining effective IT financial management. By incorporating financial modeling, SAS goes beyond traditional IT chargeback and delivers a rational, repeatable and comprehensive IT accounting solution that enables the alignment of IT to the business objectives of the enterprise. SAS IT Intelligence: Establishing New Conversations Let s examine the two parts of SAS IT Intelligence in detail: resource optimization and financial optimization. Each optimization capability equates to a section of management responsibility within IT. And while each capability could successfully be used in isolation, the true strength of SAS IT Intelligence is its ability to help IT departments align with the business, achieve the best balance between cost and service, and develop accurate forecasts for a more proactive, value-based approach to IT. For the organization as a whole to be successful, optimization capabilities must also build on the same representations of data and business applications. An IT data mart reconciles infrastructure data and provides the basis for these representations. Through the process of creating IT intelligence, business application representations will continually be used in conjunction with capacity forecasts and financial capabilities to aid the alignment of IT resources, costs and business objectives. Figure 2: SAS IT Resource Management data mart. Because the allocation of resources remains a primary issue for IT, we ll begin with resource optimization. Resource Optimization As organizations become increasingly dependent on technology, there is a renewed emphasis on capacity planning and demand management. It is imperative to buy and deploy the right amount of infrastructure at the right time without wasting existing resources. However, the differences today are the options available to acquire that infrastructure, including physical and virtual resources, internal and external clouds, and hosted capabilities. The fact remains that intelligently provisioning IT resources saves money and ensures that the needs of the business are met.

5 3 To acquire and deploy resources in the right amount and at the right time, IT departments need the ability to predict where the business is going and then translate that information into IT resources. Successful resource optimization requires the completion of several vital tasks: Measuring resource usage. Identifying utilization trends and behaviors. Forecasting resource saturation levels and workload growth based on service objectives. Predicting resource exhaustion dates. Maximizing the value of underused infrastructure through appropriate server consolidation. Measuring resource usage Capacity managers seek alignment between business objectives, infrastructure capacity and volume capabilities. The key to this level of alignment is building end-to-end representations of business applications using infrastructure data from the disparate sources throughout the IT enterprise. SAS IT Resource Management overcomes many of the challenges of creating workload characterizations in shared environments or developing end-to-end application logical representations by correlating disparate data from virtually any source. Forecasting saturation and growth Forecasting, a key enabler of resource optimization, is part art and part science. The science involves forecasting workload characterizations by testing multiple alternatives under identical and repeatable conditions. These experiments are most effective with actual workload data rather than synthetic data. While synthetic data is only as reliable as the synthetic model, actual data provides a reliable and repeatable representation. The art of forecasting involves studying the possible changes in workloads that result from adjusting the model. Knowing the spikes in workloads helps to best predict and provision for more internal assets, or a cloud approach, that is cost-efficient and secure. In the illustration below, a cluster of hosts that supports a virtual environment in an organization s internal cloud is examined to understand the impact of one host s failure on the others. Whether it s an acceptable IT strategy to expect a host to perform at some 250 percent of its known capacity depends on the importance of the hosted work. Figure 4: This graph lets you examine the effect of one host s failure on others in a cluster. Figure 3: Mainframe workload analysis report supplied with SAS IT Resource Management. As a result, IT can understand how all IT infrastructure components interact to facilitate business activities. This picture of resource usage in terms of business activities is an essential component of business alignment, financial optimization and service-level management. To ensure that capacity planning activities align with enterprise goals, business plans and initiatives should be used to determine the new capabilities IT must provide. Typical plans include volume projections, growth objectives and service-level criteria for any given business investment.

6 4 Business plans alone aren t enough to encompass all growth factors. Forecasting technology can help you predict saturation levels and then vary business transactions and services according to peak business times and trends. Such advanced planning techniques are a significant step toward helping IT align with business goals. Such planning also requires the IT organization to fully understand its historical and current performance and capacity. Existing trends in resource utilization are often excellent predictors of future growth. For example, a credit card company s issuance of new cards could be tracked as a business metric and used when forecasting capacity. Resource optimization provides sophisticated statistical analysis of trends that is much more accurate than simple trend lines. Forecasts can help account for an annual upsurge experienced during peak seasons, for example. Maximizing the value of underused infrastructure While providing the correct capacity at the right time is an essential and complex undertaking, harvesting and repurposing underused infrastructure is a facet of optimization that directly affects the bottom line. Great savings can be realized by eliminating nonbusiness resource usage, minimizing redundant resources and combining server workloads. This process begins with an overall evaluation of the resources associated with a particular environment. One way to visualize this vast volume of data is a tile chart where color and size are indicators of a resource s utilization. Determining resource-saturation levels requires accounting for multiple resources simultaneously. CPU, memory, disk space, disk I/O rates and network utilization must all be considered and should be planned for peak periods. Saturation thresholds have an effect on service levels and service-level management as well. Figure 6: A tile chart as shown in the SAS IT Resource Management Gallery Manager application. SAS software provides the power to consolidate disparate data and generate workload characterizations of shared resources or end-to-end business applications. As a result, IT finally has the information it needs to deploy the right amount of infrastructure at the right time for strategic business applications. Figure 5: A Resource Exhaust Forecast report supplied by SAS IT Resource Management. Financial Optimization Financial optimization is the glue that binds resource and service optimization to enterprise strategy. As crucial as resource and service-level management are, both must still be balanced with cost expectations. Resource and service management leave unanswered budgetary questions, such as: Why are we spending the money? How much do I have to spend? Is cloud computing less expensive than an internally managed infrastructure? Where does virtualization provide a cost savings? How can I improve financial performance?

7 5 It is easy to overspend and, as a result, hurt the business. Without tying service costs to results, it is impossible to align IT with strategic business goals. To complete the picture, SAS Activity- Based Management and SAS Profitability Management are used to determine the fully leveraged per-unit cost of delivering IT capabilities to the business. With this information, and the IT performance database available from SAS IT Resource Management, the picture is complete, and the linkages between the business, its consumption of IT and the cost to deliver those IT capabilities are established. With this IT intelligence, what will the meeting agenda look like the next time IT meets with a business unit where you work? Summary SAS IT Intelligence provides data integration, analytics and business intelligence to solve the issues that prevent true alignment between IT and business. Consolidating data about IT resources into a report- and analysis-ready repository that shows their relevance for various business applications builds the foundation those organizations need to provide the right services to the right people at the right time, and for the right cost. SAS automatically tracks utilization, availability, response time and throughput against business needs and calculates the costs of delivering IT capabilities. With knowledge of costs based on consumption, IT and its business partners can discuss resources and business goals in terms of the value IT provides. Only this kind of intelligence enables IT to evolve from supplier to partner to trusted adviser.

8 To contact your local SAS office, please visit: sas.com/offices SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Copyright 2014, SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved _S