Automating your data center can improve operational efficiency and give you control over service quality, security, and business agility, while simultaneously reducing risk and costs.
B M C I N D U S T R Y I N S I G H T S
Five Steps to Gaining Control and Managing
Complexity in the Data Center through
Service Automation
By Kia Behnia
Chief Corporate Architect, CTO Of? ce, BMC Software
n the early days of the telephone, when human operators manually switched calls, it was predicted that eventually every mIan, woman, and child in the United States would need to provide operator service to support the rapidly growing and increasingly complex telephone network. You may have made a similar assessment of what it will take to manage your IT infrastructure.
It's like navigating through a "perfect storm." Over the last decade, IT infrastruc-tures have become exceedingly complex, resulting in a highly interconnected network of new and powerful technologies. This complex IT network includes new technolo-gies, such as server virtualization, as well as legacy distributed and mainframe computing environments that support millions of As such, you must demonstrate agility and operational efficiency and gain control transactions through multi-tiered applications. efficiency throughout the lifecycle of over service quality, security, and business Many of the day-to-day management change, release, and configuration manage- agility, while simultaneously reducing risk activities supporting this complex environ- ment. It's also important to automate the and costs and making compliance a by-ment are still performed manually, often with lifecycle management of critical business product of your processes.little repeatability and low reliability. In this services across the entire IT infrastructure, mode of operation, even the slightest including physical and virtual servers, applica- In charting your course to service automa-human error can cause devastating service tions, network devices, and client systems. tion, take a deliberate and well-planned outages that adversely affect quality of You must do this in an environment that is incremental approach. Address your most service, top-line revenues, and even a in a state of continual flux, with changing critical areas first, and then continue to company's reputation. To make matters business conditions, a changing user base, improve those areas while adding more worse, government regulations and internal and a continuing flood of patches and capabilities.policies are demanding stricter governance updates.and auditability. As if that were not enough, STEP 1: ESTABLISH YOUR VISIONsenior management is pressuring IT to Fortunately, you can meet these challenges In this step, assess your current situation and reduce costs, while the complexity of the IT through service automation. Service auto- establish your vision for service automation.infrastructure seems to grow every year. mation includes a set of integrated solutions for automated configuration management. The eye of this perfect storm is the data Service automation enables you to auto- > Gain a greater understanding of your current center. To effectively manage your data mate provisioning, patching, auditing, and IT operations and processes, such as center in this turbulent atmosphere, you remediating software across servers, network provisioning and compliancehave to navigate through territory in which devices, and client systems in support of > Identify your pain points and the key busi-the cost of mistakes can be substantial and changing business needs. By automating ness bene? ts you expect to achievethe chance of making mistakes is increasing. these onerous tasks, you can improve B M C I N D U S T R Y I N S I G H T S
> Begin to prioritize your initiatives based on The program plan should address milestones, > Measure and evaluate the bene? ts realized business impact. "If IT improves 'x' process, project dependencies, deliverables, review from the projects using the metrics you what is the tangible business impact?" requirements, and project resources. You also established in Step 2> Take the ? rst steps toward developing a need to establish a common foundation for > Ensure that the solutions are operated and roadmap for implementing a service automa- the program that includes service definitions, maintained effectivelytion capability to meet your business needs IT processes, and supporting technology > Continually monitor and improve upon architecture, as well as governance and orga- the process, technol... [download for more]
