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The problem is change; the solution is change. Like firefighters setting controlled burns to combat forest fires, IT managers are addressing the demands of business change by introducing change of their own. To meet new business needs, new applications are deployed on new architectures using new technologies. To serve growing demands for service availability, IT implements network redundancy and server clusters. To improve efficiency, IT turns to server, storage and user access virtualization. To address corporate security and governance requirements, IT implements new processes and tools. And often the IT organization begins to mirror the technology itself with new teams of professionals organized into expertise silos, each with its own technology focus.
Change is occurring in IT people, processes and technology. Like all departments, IT operations must step up to meet change with change of its own, and often with little or no additional budget. But outdated or uncoordinated management tools mire IT operations in the past, preventing them from taking the steps necessary to move the business ahead. HP Operations Center software helps IT operations managers enable change in the organization, in processes and in technology by providing a more unified view of an increasingly diverse IT world. This paper looks at the current business challenges that impact IT, five strategies you can use to meet business needs and how HP can assist you in responding to business change.
To understand the solution, we must look more closely at the problem. For the most part, 21st century IT change is driven by 21st century business change. Each change driver evokes an IT response which creates additional demands on IT operations management. Here are some of the key factors.
Each IT response presents a set of specific challenges to the IT operations department. Meeting those challenges requires IT operations managers to drive change of their own. Let’s look at each IT response individually to see how it impacts operations and how HP Operations Center software helps operations managers fight fire with fire.
Each new solution demanded by the business brings with it a plethora of new facilities and technologies, and urgency often trumps consistency. The application may run on your standard server operating system, or your choice may not be available until the next release. The application will have a database—maybe your preferred one, maybe not. Increasingly, applications will be built on middleware like BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere or Microsoft® .Net. They may use web services technologies like Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and universal description, discovery and integration (UDDI) and may implement a service oriented architecture (SOA). The application may even have its own management interface to help you configure and use it and to monitor the status of the application elements.
The tools that come with an application may do an excellent job of monitoring that particular application, and the technologies underlying the new application may be better and more flexible than those already installed. But IT operations must reduce additional training and must be able to fit the new technology into existing processes. To do this, IT operations must create and maintain a more uniform view of increasingly diverse infrastructure.
Technology proliferation often creates specialty silos within IT. These specialists need special tools, but they also must support common processes. IT must provide common understanding between operations and specialty teams to improve communications and prevent dropped balls. And specialty teams and operations staff must share common priorities to enable IT to address the problems having the most impact on the business.
How HP Operations Center software helps HP Operations Center helps IT managers deal with technology proliferation in several ways: - It has the scope to discover, recognize and manage the new elements. It supports popular Windows®, Linux and UNIX® operating systems and has HP Operations Smart Plug-ins for dozens of key applications, databases and middleware elements. In addition to extensible and customizable agents, HP Operations Center includes agentless monitoring that further extends the scope while reducing administrative burdens.
- It provides operators a unified view of the IT service and its supporting infrastructure, and it offers specialized views to those who need them. Support teams for applications, databases, middleware and web servers each participate in unified processes for problem detection, investigation, escalation and restoration.
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