Rise Above IT Chaos: Navigate IT Complexity and Deliver Business Value

Transcription

1 Rise Above IT Chaos: Navigate IT Complexity and Deliver Business Value

2 IT in a State of Chaos With the continued digitalization of business, IT is not only vital, it drives the business. A growing number of applications are critical to business success, and IT is under a lot of pressure to ensure its availability. Adding to that pressure is unpredictable technology alongside infrastructure that is growing more and more complex. IT departments need to manage physical and virtual systems running on a variety of operating systems and hardware platforms, onsite, offsite, and in the cloud. Trying to utilize a variety of tools to manage performance, monitor health, and determine the cause of bottlenecks is difficult with so many disparate systems. Additionally, many management and monitoring tools only notify you once a problem has occurred. You end up spending a lot of time sorting through data and reacting to problems, which takes away from your ability to properly plan for the future. Chaos is what IT departments have come to expect. It drains your organization s productivity and ultimately damages the overall agility of your business and its ability to innovate. In this ebook, we will examine the common causes of IT chaos and what you can do about it.

3 Health Check Most IT teams are fighting fires as they arise without a clear path toward increasing productivity. These teams respond to outages and performance issues after a problem already exists, not before the problem occurs. The first step to reining in IT chaos is understanding the current environment. Can you get your arms around the overall health of your infrastructure? How are your systems performing right now? Understanding an infrastructure s health allows you to quickly identify problems that need attention, rather than wasting time searching for where the problem resides. The difficulty is analyzing thousands of data points across several management tools to understand where to focus attention before a problem impacts customers. Looking at items like CPU performance, memory utilization, and I/O bottlenecks can help show you what needs attention now. However, to be most effective, checking these metrics on a consistent basis requires automation. With automated analysis, you can start to reduce the chaos. When you understand the current risks, you can prioritize what needs to be addressed to keep your core infrastructure operating smoothly. Once you no longer have to worry about surprise problems, your team can focus on ways to improve the business. 75% 70 to 75% of IT budgets are spent on running day-to-day operations. 1 IT professionals at companies with over 1,000 employees report the following problem areas: 2 42% 37% 37% 36% 34% Network slowdowns and outages Poor application performance Availability issues Equipment failures x Unanticipated change requests

4 Day-to-Day Chaos Now that the core infrastructure is healthy, how do you keep it that way? It s easy to end up back in reaction-mode when a problem occurs. This puts enormous pressure on your team s ability to ensure performance and remain ahead of issues. For example, how often does your team first learn about a performance problem from a user? How often do you receive an alert from a monitoring tool that a system is slow or offline? This is where predictive analytics comes into play. Predictive analytics goes beyond simply telling you what is currently happening in your environment. It notifies your team in advance of a problem, allowing you to make proactive infrastructure decisions based on real information. For predictive analytics to work, it requires highly accurate algorithms that account for non-linear behavior constantly running behind-the-scenes and automatically analyzing thousands of data points to make sense of what is really going on. Once implemented, predictive analytics moves you further away from IT chaos.

5 Preparing for Spikes and Planning for the Future While using predictive analytics can help you keep your environment healthy, businesses are constantly changing. They experience spikes in demand. They have to grow and adapt to market conditions. For technology to enable the business and drive business value, it has to be proactive in identifying when and where capacity is required and have the agility to address changes in a fast-paced, dynamic environment. There are tools available to help you plan how much capacity you need. The problem is that most of these tools are limited. They do not tie performance monitoring information with trends, simulation modeling, and automated analytic modeling. For capacity planning to be truly effective, it needs to be intelligent. By utilizing real-time and historical performance data with business projections, your company can predict demands and meet the needs of individual business units. This process should be automated to avoid taking up additional IT resources. When you combine real-time and historical data with predictive analysis, you can plan for virtually every scenario. This provides a way to bring business planning deeper into the IT department and prevent chaos in the future. Top 5 CIO priorities: 3 48% 45% 45% 45% 44% Performance Innovation Customers Cost Growth

6 Bring Order and Predictability to IT Combining predictive analytics with intelligent capacity planning has the ability to transform your organization. This combination enables your team to focus more on strategic initiatives and less on reacting to issues that arise. Gaining control over your infrastructure can have a dramatic impact on your overall business. A healthy infrastructure helps your business become more agile, quickly adapting to take advantage of business opportunities. You can also avoid unexpected downtime and productivity losses. With better capacity planning, you avoid over-provisioning systems or buying hardware that is not needed allowing you to get the most from your company s IT budget. A vendorneutral planning tool will help you find the most cost-effective solutions when you need to plan for more capacity. The insight needed to reach these goals is available today. It is time to take the chaos out of IT and gain control over your infrastructure.

7 Is your team ready to be more proactive with your infrastructure management? If you have struggled with your environment, download the white paper, How to Do Capacity Planning info@teamquest.com SOURCES 1. Forrester 2. Kelton Global 3. Deloitte