Trade.Information

Product Name: IT Infrastructure Management

Product Description

In 1963, meteorologist Edward Lorenz created a famous concept now known as the Butterfly Effect when he asked the question: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? Just as Lorenz’ Brazilian butterfly has the potential to set off a tornado on the other side of the world, any change to IT environments -- no matter the size -- can have severe, unintended consequences thanks to today’s interconnected and complex webs of systems, networks, applications and databases. IT environments are subject to a dizzying array of product upgrades, device consolidations and user change requests that require an organization to flawlessly execute changes. As complexity increases within the IT enterprise, knowing how things are connected, and the consequences are changes, can mean the difference between success and failure. Service Level Agreements: The Carrot and The Stick IT infrastructures, which were once only exposed to internal audiences, are now on display for the world. The pressure to keep these systems available, reliable and performing at the highest levels is intense. The direct outgrowth of this new business environment is the increase of formal Service Levels Agreements (SLAs) between service providers and customers. SLAs are important tools because the cost of downtime to organizations can be immense. Any downtime resulting in a degraded ability, or inability, to service customers has an impact on revenue. This economic impact can vary significantly depending on the degree of competition in the industry, as well as the loyalty of customers. Additional costs, which are not readily apparent, can contribute to future revenue lost due to damage to the company’s reputation. Reducing the Risk of Change and Improving Quality The big challenge now facing IT executives is how to mitigate risk while dealing with significant budget cuts that do not reflect the unrelenting number of enterprise changes squeezed into small (and shrinking) maintenance windows, with increased emphasis on availability. Achieving this has caused many organizations to put into place rigorous change management policies. But even a well thought-out and disciplined change management process cannot help minimize the risks that result from the Butterfly Effect. Change management processes make a big assumption: that you know exactly where devices are located, exactly what software operates those devices and exactly which applications, networks, databases and organizations are affected by the change. In other words, when the butterfly flaps its wings in your IT organization, do you know exactly what the effect will be? Overcoming the Butterfly Effect with IT Infrastructure Management Organizations can mitigate these effects by automating their IT Infrastructure Management (ITIM). Aggregating and integrating data from multiple sources about the physical and logical infrastructure is a crucial first step in ITIM. Ideally, this repository should store information in a visual format, containing both scaled drawings of the environment, as well as detailed information on every device. The second requirement for effective IT Infrastructure Management is the automation and digitization of standardized ITIM processes. Within IT organizations, multiple groups need to effectively communicate and share information to deliver the required service levels and availability. Automated process management enables these groups to streamline and better manage the delivery of services. Finally, effective IT Infrastructure Management means that detailed information can be shared across the enterprise in an easy-to-use, intuitive, visual manner. In other words, it needs to be “actionable information” -- information delivered in context, in a format fit for immediate use. ITIM Minimizes the Butterfly Effect IT Infrastructure Management is now being embraced by organizations around the world as a means of achieving large increases in availability and reliability for relatively modest investments in services and tools. Organizations implementing ITIM have achieved these goals by reducing the time required to resolve problems, improving capacity planning, streamlining change management, increasing business resiliency and better managing their data center assets. Those enterprises that have made the leap to effective IT Infrastructure Management no longer fear the winds of change -- or Lorenz’ butterfly.