Complex Enterprise Class Applications support tens of thousands of users and process millions of transactions in a day. A down time of even a few minutes could translate into lost business and have a direct financial impact on the Organization. Such applications have complex interactions with different elements – Host Operating Systems, Network Components (LAN & WAN), Application Servers, Database Servers, Web Servers & Client Operating Systems.
Managing such application is not the same as managing the individual elements in the setup. Ensuring that the devices are performing well does not always translate to better performance for the end users. It is increasingly becoming difficult to find experts in the application who also have the in-depth knowledge of different infrastructure components to identify and troubleshoot incidents & problems in the quickest possible time. The global trend pattern predicted is that the Infrastructure Capital Costs are going down while the Infrastructure Management costs are increasing. In many Organizations, the Management costs are more than 60% of their IT budget. If this trend continues, what are the options available to the CTO of an Organization to reduce the Management Cost:
- Outsource and if required Offshore operations to a cheaper vendor and location. This option has proved successful with large Organizations setting up Captives & Outsourcing the routine operations of IT Management. The ITSM guideline based on ITIL standards has become the reference for Managing IT operations and parts of these processes can be outsourced to a cost effective vendor.
- Increased level of usage of tools & automation to eliminate manual activities. There have been a slew of specialized tools built by different vendors to manage & automate specific set of activities. IBM, HP, CA & Remedy have a whole suite of tools to monitor, manage & automate most of the IT operational activities. But I find that that there is a huge cost involved in setting up & integrating the set of tools to cover the complete scope of IT operations. The SMB segment is finding it difficult to implement such high-end tools and this in turn has created a set of low cost solution providers who have taken the task of targeting the SMB segment with specific tools. The current state of IT operations in most Organizations is typically a combination of specific tools for critical operations and manual process driven operations for the non-critical operations to balance the IT cost.
Looking into the future I see new technology solutions that are maturing to tackle the problems of IT management. One such approach is Autonomic Computing, many companies are working on this initiative and a key proponent of this is IBM.
Definition - Autonomic computing is a self-managing computing model named after, and patterned on, the human body’s autonomic nervous system. An autonomic computing system would control the functioning of computer applications and systems without input from the user, in the same way that the autonomic nervous system regulates body systems without conscious input from the individual. The goal of autonomic computing is to create systems that run themselves, capable of high-level functioning while keeping the system’s complexity invisible to the user.
If this lives up to its promise, then IT infrastructure systems & applications would manage themselves and the whole IT Management would focus on defining the governance policies & SLA instead of worrying about the operational procedures. I will be exploring this technology and other technology solutions that would impact ITSM and keep the post updated in the coming weeks.