By Jennifer Chapski
Today’s IT organizations must strike a difficult balance between change and control. On the one hand, customers depend on IT to provide the speed and agility necessary to deliver a wide range of applications and services. On the other hand, it is critical that IT maintain security, compliance and efficiency standards while managing systems. At the same time, data centers are growing rapidly in complexity and scale, making IT operations management more challenging than ever before.
As a result, legacy tools and point solutions have proven inadequate for the modern data center, creating a variety of problems that impact productivity. For example, IT teams often find themselves buried in monitoring data, unable to process it quickly enough to put it to good use. Instead of enabling IT to address problems or optimize systems to run more efficiently, potentially useful data is often discarded because it’s simply too much for human beings to analyze.
In order to make better use of available data, IT organizations are increasingly recognizing the need for a solution that provides intelligent operations management across physical and virtual infrastructures. Here are three ways IT organizations can better leverage data to fully realize the benefits of the hybrid cloud:
Holistic view of data center: Traditional solutions have only provided siloed visibility into applications and infrastructure, which leaves IT organizations with an incomplete picture of system interdependencies. Effectively managing today’s hybrid cloud environments requires a solution that utilizes all IT data, including KPIs, metrics, events and logs. By correlating all this data into a unified view, IT gains a genuine and deep understanding of the interactions between various components of their infrastructure.
Policy enforcement and guided remediation: For an IT department to operate efficiently, employees can’t be bogged down with lots of manual troubleshooting. Automated policy enforcement and guided remediation engines greatly improve the efficiency of data processing, but still give IT administrators control over their infrastructure.
Real-time data analysis: Real-time data analysis allows the system to identify issues and suggest the best course of action, providing IT administrators with the tools they need to make an informed decision. IT has more time to spend on tasks with greater business value, such as proactively looking for issues that might lead to websites crashing.
Predictive analytics: In a complex cloud environment, analytics can help IT identify and address problems before they negatively affect the business. The latest advances in statistical processing have allowed mainstream analytics to make reasonably reliable forecasts of future events. This new capability is often referred to as “predictive” analytics. These powerful tools can help identify hidden value in large quantities of structured and unstructured data, revealing trends in performance and resource use—and predicting future needs. In addition to helping ensure the performance and service levels of the infrastructure and applications, predictive analytics can help an IT organization avoid issues such as over-provisioning, and running out of storage.
Taken together, these four feature areas will provide the IT infrastructure team with a higher degree of visibility and control across physical and virtual assets. Intelligent operations ultimately depend upon identifying the root of problems almost immediately—or even preventing failure before it occurs.
Discover how vRealize Suite addresses all these issues and more.
Jennifer Chapski is a Southern California based observer of business, technology, and consumer trends.
