By: Brian Wilson >> IT leaders today are tasked with one simple directive – make sure everything works all the time. Sure, that is flippant, but the reality is not that far from the literal. We used to get away with telling our line of business owners that they could have reliable at the cost of some performance. That services could be failure tolerant but we needed time and more money to set it up. And that sure, all the functionality requested could be delivered but they just needed to wait patiently while everything was set up.
But today, there is no OR in IT – It is all about the AND. IT is expected to deliver resilient, fault tolerate, performant and available services practically on demand. IT departments big and small have embraced the cloud, fully endorsing hybrid infrastructure. Application Performance Management (APM) vendors are feeling the pressure of not having a view into infrastructure health and are changing their business plans to accommodate. Everyone is looking at their previous investments in ticketing, CMDB and orchestration tools and wondering how to integrate them seamlessly into a self aware platform delivering a business outcome as opposed to some defined availability metric.
At VMworld 2016 just this week, the keynote by VMware execs was all about hybrid IT. One year ago, you would not hear VMware talking about hybrid IT in such large forums. Hybrid IT is more than just embracing Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure in addition to your physical infrastructure. It is understanding how to operate in Gartner’s Bi-Modal model. It is embracing converged and hyper-converged technology. It is being open to newer container technologies and watching for the advent of mainstream micro-services in application development. It is fundamentally altering the development stack to make room for Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions. And it is about doing all of this at once with the governance framework in place to help guide your organization to the right technology for the outcome and solution required.
Sound hard? You bet! I argue that there is not a tougher technical problem in the enterprise today. Government entities, service providers struggle with the same problems with even more constraints around security and top line revenue goals respectively. IT leaders are being asked more than anyone else to transform the business, and do for less (not more!) expense.
IT Leaders Succeed With "AND"
Thinking back to the prime directive (making sure everything works all the time), it is clear that the effective IT organization have a clear view of what is happening, the ability to correlate all that information into a simple service impacting context and finally processes and integrations in place get the right information out to the right folks so the proper actions are taken immediately. At Zenoss, we refer to this as a See – Know – Act framework. Effective and cutting edge technology monitoring today does much more than just see everything. It must correlate that view into knowledge that drive the right actions.
Zenoss today is helping companies around the globe put the platforms in place to solve these problems today. The journey varies based on the maturity of your organization, how much you have invested in other initiatives in the past, and what your specific end goals are. Give us a call to talk about how we can help you move from an OR world to AND.
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