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The CA vision is Enterprise IT Management, or EITM. What this means is producing products that help customers unify and simplify the management of enterprise-wide IT, not only all of a company’s assets, network, systems, and database, but also the enduser experience as it relates to the IT services as well as the business processes. Figure 1 shows a statement of the CA vision graphically.
Why is this so important? Figure 2 shows the key benefits of CA’s EITM vision as they relate to managing risk, managing cost, improving service, and aligning the investment in information technology.
The Challenges of Managing Network Services
What are some of the key challenges of the management of network services? Are these network services impacting users? These are some of the more important challenges of managing network services:
- The cost of downtime—The challenge is to minimize outages and service degradation.
- Proactive service assurance—Can problems be detected before they impact end users?
- Rapid problem identification—Is it possible to pinpoint the exact location of degraded and failed devices using patented root-cause and impact analysis?
Predictive capacity planning—The challenge is to ensure that adequate capacity exists to support mission-critical applications.
- Service level management—It is important to understand and communicate how well IT is supporting the business.
The Cost of Downtime
A major challenge shared by CIOs, IT personnel, and network managers is the cost of downtime. Downtime is not just about outages or component failure, but includes service degradations, poor response, and the cost associated with that downtime. It is also a major concern of the users.
Proactive Service Assurance
Proactive service assurance means detecting problems before they impact end users. It is a challenge to proactively manage infrastructure, provide service assurance, and detect problems before they occur. Doing this well means that some problems or issues important to users become predictable, rather than having those problems or issues be discovered by users. This is an issue for many companies. Proactive service assurance is a significant challenge.
Rapid Problem Identification
Once problems are known and the ones that need to be addressed have been determined, the challenge is to find the causes so they can be fixed. Identifying the real problems, rather than being distracted by the noise of secondary problems, is an issue.
Predictive Capacity Planning
Is the capacity adequate to support mission-critical applications or to merge voice and data? Will the infrastructure be able to handle the increased load when more users are added, new customers are added, branches are consolidated, or a merger or acquisition takes place?
Capacity may be adequate today, but this does not necessarily mean that it will be tomorrow. Running a new application or making some configuration changes may result in new challenges. So, adequate capacity planning is a very interesting challenge.
Service Level Management
It is all about services. How do end users experience these services? How well is the IT mission understood and communicated? Whether service levels are informal, formal, or contractual, it is very important to manage services.
A Business Value Story
The University of Rochester Medical Center is a leading medical center in upstate New York, with over 1,500 physicians and 2,000 nurses. It includes various hospitals, dental centers, and medical facilities. Its business problem was twofold:
- Manage critical applications supported by their IT infrastructure
- Minimize application or device degradation or failure
Figure 3 provides more details about these problems and the CA solution.
The Medical Center used eHealth and SPECTRUM, two CA products. These capabilities came from CA’s acquisition of a company called Concord Communications. The specific capabilities that helped the University of Rochester Medical Center overcome their business challenges were in the root-cause and impact analysis areas. With the root-cause analysis, they were able to capture alarm escalations that helped them pinpoint precisely where the problem was, and were able to provide actionable and understandable information to the medical staff. In the predictive capacity planning area, they were able to ensure that they had an adequate level of bandwidth. These CA products monitored the performance and trends and were able to provide intelligence when the network devices had a problem or indicate when performance deviated from the norm.
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