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The business environment is changing at a dizzying pace, driven by globalization, business virtualization, outsourcing, and other factors. To compete, and indeed to survive, enterprises must increase their agility. They must be able to swiftly adapt business processes to accommodate changing business conditions. To drive business agility, they must also have agile information technology (IT) resources, including hardware, software, networks, processes, and people.
Supporting changing business processes is not easy. Enterprises are becoming more virtualized as business processes are increasingly distributed across organizations. At the same time, the technology environment is shifting dramatically. The evolution of on-demand computing is accelerating the virtualization of IT resources. To complicate matters even more, the evolving service-oriented software architecture is expanding the distribution of IT services across sources both inside and outside the enterprise. These rapid shifts are making it ever more difficult to manage business processes and the IT resources that drive them.
To meet the challenge, IT professionals need to transform their orientation from "managing boxes" to managing IT resources from a business perspective. They should understand the enterprise's business processes and how the components of the IT infrastructure support these processes.
> This insight requires the development of new and innovative solutions that enable IT to view the topology of the business processes and the IT infrastructure components mapped to that topology.
> This information is vital to the CIO who needs to ensure that IT-dependent business processes stay up and running, and that processes are adapted quickly as the business environment changes.
The rewards make it well worth the effort: increased business agility, rapid business problem resolution, and more effective business activity monitoring. Meeting the challenge elevates the role of IT professionals ? from technologists reacting to the business needs of the organization to business value creators who help determine strategic direction. Through this transformation, IT becomes a key contributor of business value and a participant in advancing business goals.
> This paper describes the evolution of IT systems management and the key technologies supporting this evolution.
> It identifies the next major step ? the development of solutions that enable IT to link infrastructure directly to the individual business processes it supports ? so that IT can help manage the execution of the business.
> Finally, the paper presents an example of a next-generation solution currently in development. This solution will arm IT professionals with the tools they need to succeed.
Introduction ? The Evolution of IT Systems Management
IT systems management continues to evolve to meet fast-changing IT and business environments. Early on, IT infrastructures were monolithic, with small numbers of individual components concentrated in a few locations. The approach was to manage individual physical resources ? computers, data storage devices, and network devices ? separately, by facility.
Later, as hardware architectures became distributed, tools emerged to support the management of distributed systems. The approach evolved to managing the IT infrastructure across the enterprise from a central point. As Figure 1 illustrates, the tools present a consolidated, enterprise view of the physical topology of the IT infrastructure, showing the servers, routers, switches, load balancers, firewalls, desktops and other physical components, their configurations and locations, and their physical interrelationships.
As enterprise applications became distributed across multiple physical components, tools began to support the management of the IT infrastructure from a logical perspective. As Figure 2 (page 3) shows, these tools present the logical topology of the IT infrastructure, showing the databases, application servers, Web servers, mail servers, gateways, applications, hosting computers, and other logical components along with their logical relationships.
Business Service Management
Today, IT resources play a vital role in achieving business success through Business Service Management, or BSM. This concept enables IT to activate the business by managing through the powerful and effective management of technology. For example, downtime or even a slowdown of a critical packaged application that supports customer ordering could have serious business impact. Consequently, enterprises demand that the IT staff deliver services aligned with business needs at agreed-on levels of performance and availability.
In response to this demand, systems management tools have evolved to permit IT to visualize and quickly understand the impact of IT component availability and performance on business services..
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