According to Forrester, organizations spent $1.5 trillion globally managing IT last year. 75% of this was spent on silos, legacy systems that still don't get answers to the most important questions: troubleshooting outages, investigating security incidents, and demonstrating compliance. Learn about the innovative software product forward-thinking organizations are using to dramatically improve their productivity and change the way they manage and secure IT.
Executive Brief:
IT Silos Are Hurting Your Company:
Make IT Data a Strategic Asset.
Splunk Inc. | 250 Brannan Street | San Francisco, CA 94107 | www.splunk.com | info@splunk.com
Copyright 2009 Splunk Inc. All rights reserved.Abstract:
At a time when it's tougher than ever to compete, the ability to use IT to achieve results is more business critical than ever. The pressures are relentless: new technology layers, strict governance practices, regulatory mandates, and evolving security threats have all combined to increase the cost and complexity of running IT. In 2008 alone, organizations spent over $1 Trillion globally managing all of this1 .
The key to effectively managing, securing and auditing IT is locked in the data IT systems generate. IT data holds the answers to what applications, servers, network devices, users and outsiders have been doing. Until now, companies have had to manually traverse silos of IT data to get all this information - a cumbersome and expensive activity, far removed from the business decision-making process. To ensure the right information is available to the right people at the right time a dramatic shift is needed. A data-agnostic approach is required to integrate all IT data and provide visibility regardless of the format or silo.
One company, Splunk, is fundamentally changing how organizations manage, secure and audit IT. By enabling organizations to search and analyze all their siloed IT data from a single location in real time, they can now troubleshoot application outages, investigate security incidents, and demonstrate compliance in minutes, not hours or days. This paper outlines the struggles organizations face managing silos of IT data and how, using Splunk, users are changing the way they do their jobs and elevating the role of IT in their organizations.
Introduction: The Rise of IT Data
IT Is Under a Lot of PressureIn 2008 IT spend reached more than $1.5 Trillion globally. Unfortunately, 75% of this budget was spent on legacy systems, including support, maintenance, application troubleshooting, security and compliance2. Enterprises invest far too much managing their IT infrastructures and too little on innovation. This drains precious resources and prevents IT from being a strategic business enabler.
Existing Approaches Are Cumbersome, Costly and Don't ScaleTraditional approaches to managing IT are limited and locked into technology or functional silos. A separate tool is required for each kind of data and every type of task. As IT complexity increases, organizations now find themselves with many point solutions that don't work together, are expensive to maintain, and don't deliver the answers they need. Or they have deployed layer upon layer of high-level management systems, which filter out much of the essential IT data, requiring people to still pick through systems by hand.
The tools we have to manage IT have not kept pace with the rapid change in technology. Innovations designed to help us maximize resources, like service-oriented architecture (SOA), virtualization and cloud computing, can't be realized due to ineffective IT management.
1 Forrester, Global IT Survey, 20092 Forrester, Global IT Survey, 2009Executive Brief: IT Silos Are Hurting Your Company: Make IT Data a Strategic Asset Page 1 of 7Copyright 2009 Splunk Inc. All rights reserved.IT Silos Drive Enormous Ine!cienciesTake a look at the time consuming, manual labor-based, application troubleshooting scenario below.
Time spent (23 hours) and silos traversed to troubleshoot a failure.
Is this picture familiar? Hundreds of times a day, in every IT organization, trouble tickets, security incidents and requests for compliance audits arrive at the service desk. Lacking information, service desk staff create tickets and escalate the issue to other teams. Silos of data, tools and processes hinder any effective collaboration, and the escalations bounce around IT departments like pin balls. Industry analyst firm, Forrester Research, estimates that over 70% of service desk issues are escalated beyond Tier 1 staff 3.
Manually traversing these silos of data takes hours or days, when in fact the business needs answers immediately. It's no wonder 75% of IT budgets are spent managing and maintaining existing applications and infrastructure.
In today's scale out, virtualized ... [download for more]
