IT Departments Can Do It Today – Really

It’s not new “news” – CEOs and CIOs always try to reduce costs. But, they haven’t always found common ground. It’s tough balancing people resources, improving business and technology processes, and reducing risks, all at the same time. But it is possible, and the industry’s second generation of RIMS is proving how. Let’s back up and explain what this means and what you should consider with any RIMS solution, especially this new generation.

The fundamental purpose of Remote Infrastructure Management Systems (RIMS) is to offload basic computing activities, applications and infrastructure maintenance to offsite resources, so IT personnel can better focus on critical needs. They work, and save time and money.

A new breed of RIMS, or “RIMS 2.0,” do all this and provide integrated enhanced monitoring, advanced behavioral analytics and preventive or remedial automations. Partnering with a vendor who delivers a “RIMS 2.0” environment is ideal for data centers and enterprises. These new capabilities move you beyond “saving the day” to “making the day” for CIOs and CEOs.

This all sounds great, but doesn’t always translate into cash savings or better IT operations. Three important questions must be answered for IT to reduce real operations costs with RIMS – today. Make sure your RIMS provider answers them.

1. How can we ensure all critical services work consistently, dependably and get a heads up before anything goes wrong?

To achieve optimal value, IT executives must engage their RIMS vendor to proactively remediate fault and application performance issues. The key: embrace a very different IT organization objective and RIMS vendor objective – prevent problems from occurring in the first place. It’s far less expensive and more productive in the long run, to prevent IT problems than to fight IT wildfires. It’s been proven in so many other industries and technology sectors that it is axiomatic. Don’t wait for the IT incident to happen and be forced to live in response mode – step it up and prevent them from ever even happening.

Your RIMS vendor must get the right data to arrive at the right answers and to take the right actions. Run regularly scheduled assessments of job effectiveness, virus protection and analysis of logs. Integrate these results with performance/fault monitoring data, configuration and change events. The key to success – the reason for “RIMS 2.0” is analytics. New, next generation IT operations analytics (ITOA) solutions analyze IT environment behavior, deliver accurate ‘early-warning,’ highly customized, automated alerts that give you and your RIMS vendor time to prevent issues from becoming critical. RIMS vendors that tightly couple remedial or preventive automations to these early-warning alerts enable the right actions to be taken, many automatically, and provide the big win.

2. How else can we make sure application performance and system faults don't affect end user experience or the bottom line?

Consistent compliance and enforcement, while not usually seen as the ‘coolest’ technology, is one of the most critical aspects of avoiding IT issues. Make sure your RIMS vendor has a very good answer here. Many of the most easily preventable IT problems result from non-compliance or lax compliance with established processes and standards. Consistent compliance and enforcement are crucial. This consistency needs to cover all operational, security and regulatory compliance. Configuration and change actions or events are core but don’t forget patches, backups, password, requests, privileges and licenses. All this information must be part of the real-time analysis mentioned previously.

It sounds a bit pedantic or excessive, but time-after-time, it’s the little things (or a lot of little things) that come back to bite you. Quickly identifying an unauthorized configuration change or non-compliant situation provides a very specific ‘heads up’ on a situation that you need to – and can – prevent.

3. How do we reduce risks and operational costs we always seem to face when changes occur in business needs and technology solutions?

The answer you want to hear from your current (or prospective) RIMS vendor is Integrated Management. Incident management, configuration/change, performance and fault monitoring, capacity management, remedial and IT process automation – all must be well integrated and work together seamlessly. Take time to check and double-check each component of your environment and of your RIMS vendor talks well and consistently with the other. With increasing complexity and interdependency of components in IT environments, a single change in one almost always affects, and can cause problems, in another. Don’t assume; assure.

Remotely managing IT services makes sense – and emerging “RIMS 2.0” capabilities make even more sense. Getting the right answers to these three key questions will help you capitalize on the potential and actually reduce operations costs at the same time. Key things to remember: Proactivity, Analytics, Automation, Consistency and Integration. Doing it right saves both time and money.

About the Author:
Ray Solnik is president of Appnomic Systems, Inc., based in Santa Clara, Calif. He has responsibility for leading Appnomic's presence in North America. Ray brings twenty years of deep technology experience in the cloud computing sector, managed network services, and data communications. Prior to joining Appnomic, Ray founded and headed a technology consulting and interim executive placement firm, Buena Vista Business Services, where he provided strategic and business development consulting services as well as interim executive leadership to technology companies including Symantec, Xerox PARC, Samsung (News - Alert), MarketTools, Zoomerang, CrowdFlower, myGengo, and others. Prior to Buena Vista, Ray was president and COO of OpSource, an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) company that operated over 200 enterprise and web applications on behalf of clients (acquired by Dimension Data - a $4 billion systems integrator), Chief Development Officer of New Edge Networks (acquired by EarthLink), and president of AT&T’s (News - Alert) consumer Internet services business, AT&T WorldNet. Earlier in his career, Ray worked in the financial services and financial software sector at American Express, Intuit (News - Alert), and Credit Union Capital. He has a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Michigan and a master's degree in business administration (MBA) from Stanford Graduate School of Business.