The Simpler Service Desk Part 1: Why Simplicity isn’t a Preference, it’s a Mandate

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Tim Rochte

Rude though it may be, the KISS (keep it simple …) principle bears particular relevance today to the enterprise service desk. There’s a fundamental appetite for simplicity. With so much going to the cloud, the expectations, both for business users and executives, have changed completely. With SaaS, we can get new services up and running in days. IaaS resources are available on demand, this morning if need be. Our online collaboration is easy to setup and adapt, and it virtually always works the way we need it.

maze image

Contrast this current reality with how the service desk has traditionally been run. Huge, complex, and cumbersome platforms. Teams of developers dedicated full time to ongoing customization. Six-figure investments up front.  Laborious integrations.

Good luck approaching a CIO today with a three year plan for a service desk rollout—with incident management deployed in six months, change management coming six months later, and so on. You can imagine the CIO’s response: “We’ve rolled out SaaS-based sales force automation, procurement, and marketing platforms in weeks, why should our service desk eclipse all those time and dollar investments combined?”

Exacerbating matters is the fact that this can lead to a vicious cycle. Executives don’t want to invest more into the service desk because it doesn’t add up financially. Because these investments don’t get made, the platform gets static, and the business value it delivers diminishes further.

Consequently, simpler isn’t just a better way, it’s the only way.

Note: This is the first in a five-part series of posts on the simpler service desk. Stay tuned for our next post, which will look at the implications of SaaS.

Facebook Twitter Linkedin Rss
Posted in Modern IT | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Systems Management Tips: How to Simplify Your Complex IT Infrastructure

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Stephen Smith

On premise and on demand, reducing the complexity of systems management is achievable with the right tools, knowledge and end-to-end visibility into your system. We polled our systems management experts to learn what opportunities exist for IT leaders to simplify systems management despite increasingly more complex IT environments. Here’s what they had to say…

Simplify

  1. Keep an up-to-date configuration management database (CMDB). We see numerous cases where an outdated CMDB adds more work and cost to systems management. In many cases, the outdated CMDB is the result of poor visibility to the physical and virtual IT environment. Modern IT monitoring solutions should provide visibility to every aspect of your IT environment with live IT monitoring reports that improve response time and lead to more proactive CMDB updates.
  2. Automate recurring tasks and where feasible. One of the leading causes of poor service management is failure to automate recurring tasks including back up and recovery, provisioning, policies, etc. Aside from recurring tasks, the service desk is another area where automation can drive more efficient service management. For example automating ticketing and then, upon resolution, automatically updating the CMDB can improve service levels, accelerate incident response and resolution, and reduce service costs.
  3. Increase visibility. We find that most systems management strategies can benefit from greater visibility to the entire IT environment—physical, virtual, on premise and on demand. One of the key benefits is an increase in proactive service management. For example, pushing out software updates is often a touchy subject in service management. No one likes downtime. With greater visibility, you can pinpoint the best time to push out updates and minimize, or in some cases eliminate service disruption.
  4. Plan for scale. We’ve encountered IT infrastructures that were doomed from the start as a result of decisions that limited its growth when the business grew. Working with leading technology providers affords greater flexibility to scale your infrastructure as well as offering unification of your existing systems management and monitoring solutions.
  5. Training and certification. Systems Management is as much about the people as it is about the hardware and applications. Make sure your IT staff is trained on the hardware, applications and any XaaS within your physical and virtual operating environment. While certifications can become costly, the opportunity cost of not certifying or at least maintaining certifications can outweigh the cost of training. Simply leveraging your in-house IT subject matter experts for training and knowledge management can go a long way toward improving service management.

    6. While there are steps you can take to reduce the complexity of your IT infrastructure, complexity is an innate characteristic of modern IT. More than simplifying complexity, improving visibility with a holistic approach to monitoring your IT infrastructure can help you better understand the complexity and manage it more effectively. Talk to a Nimsoft service management expert today and learn how you can simply service management—even in the most complex IT environments.

Facebook Twitter Linkedin Rss
Posted in Modern IT | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Mobility: Whose cost is it, anyway?

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Andrew Mueller

Mobility is a hot topic for IT. With the proliferation of smartphones, everybody is trying to figure out what kind of applications they need to deliver in order to make knowledge workers more productive when they’re away from their desks. It ought to be noted, however, that as we roll out these mobile applications, we are also driving our companies’ wireless bill through the roof.

Chris O’Malley, in his latest Computerworld article, sheds light on how the IT organization should think about this and how they can respond as a partner to business managers to both promote increased productivity through mobility and drive down costs.
…Read more

Editors note: This excerpt was taken from Chris O’Malley’s End of IT as We Know It blog for Computerworld. In this blog Chris focuses on the ever-evolving role of the IT organization. For your convenience, we are posting weekly excerpts here on the ModernIT blog. Hope you enjoy.

Facebook Twitter Linkedin Rss
Posted in Modern IT | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Gaining Confidence in the Cloud – live blog from Cloud Expo Europe

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Stephen Smith

When moving vital applications and services to the cloud, you can realize a lot of significant benefits, including real cost savings, but your business can’t afford guesswork, uncertainty, or surprises when it comes to service levels. So how do you gain confidence in your cloud deployments?

Nimsoft’s CTO Mark Rivington presented ‘Managing Your Cloud with Confidence’ recently at Cloud Expo Europe, the leading European event dedicated to cloud computing and virtualization. Here we’d like to take a closer look at what he shared.

Managing your Cloud with Confidence
View more presentations from Nimsoft

First, it’s important to start with an understanding of the different types of cloud models, and the different monitoring requirements each presents.

Infrastructure as a Service

When discussing IaaS, it’s important to understand that there are two groups that need to monitor these environments, the consumer of the service and the provider of the service. The following sections offer more information on each group.

For the service provider delivering IaaS, many of the monitoring requirements above apply. In addition, service providers need to have capabilities for:

  • Providing clients with self-service monitoring access to their cloud instances, with configurations modifiable through specific APIs.
  • Making performance and availability data accessible through the cloud service provider’s portal, through direct access, and through portal-to-portal integration.
  • Delivering tiered levels of monitoring services, with varying price points.
  • Implementing monitoring as part of the provisioning process, with templates available for each specific service tier and configuration, so appropriate policies are automatically applied at instantiation.
  • Orchestrating configuration entirely through external automation or provisioning systems.

Private Cloud

When your organization runs a private cloud, you effectively need a combination of capabilities that addresses the requirements outlined for both consumer and service providers monitoring IaaS environments. Plus, you need traditional data center monitoring for the infrastructure that underpins the private cloud.

In addition, today, many organizations choose to run their private clouds on converged infrastructure stacks like Vblock and FlexPod. Clearly, this gives rise to a need to monitor these offerings. Following is an overview the capabilities required to monitor Vblock:

  • Discovery and deployment. As with other virtualized environments, to effectively and efficiently monitor Vblock platforms, you need automated discovery and configuration capabilities, including templates that ensure monitoring deployment that is tailored to the specific use case.
  • Operational. It’s critical that you can get the visibility needed to identify under usage and over commitment of resources within Vblock, and to do efficient root cause analysis when issues arise.
  • Chassis. All aspects of the Vblock chassis need to be monitored.
  • Computing. All facets of performance of Cisco UCS blades and elements need to be tracked.
  • Storage. To track Vblock, it’s vital to monitor storage systems, which may include EMC CLARiiON, Symmetrix, and Celera.
  • Networking and interconnects. Tracking network performance is also critical, which means you need to monitor Cisco routers, SAN switches, and Nexus switches.

Ultimately, it’s vital that you can not only track the performance of these various areas, but that you get a cohesive view of the performance of the entire stack.

Keys to a “Well-behaved” Cloud Monitoring Solution

Regardless of the environment, there are many key capabilities that ensure a monitoring solution is practical and well-aligned with the dynamic nature of cloud environments. Following are some of the most vital characteristics of a “well-behaved” cloud monitoring solution:

  • Zero touch configuration and deployment. Given the dynamic nature of virtualized cloud environments, organizations need monitoring to be applied automatically, with no manual intervention, as new instances come online.
  • Registration and graceful deregistration of agents. The agents used for monitoring any virtual element need to be registered when they come online, and de-register when the system is taken offline, without generating any erroneous errors or alerts.
  • Consistent policy application. When instantiation occurs, current monitoring policies need to be applied. This requires having a central mechanism for ensuring policy updates are automatically propagated where needed.
  • Management server integration. Your collection of monitoring data should be integrated with a central management server, which enables centralized reporting.
  • Secure connections. If monitoring connections need to be established with an organization’s data center, those transmissions should be secured using such mechanisms as secure sockets layer (SSL) encryption.
Facebook Twitter Linkedin Rss
Posted in Modern IT | Tagged | Leave a comment

10,000 UCS Customers Can’t Be Wrong: The Era of Convergence Has Arrived

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Stephen Smith

If you’ve been skeptical about the hype surrounding converged infrastructure, now might be a good time to take another look.

Binary Codes and Computer Monitors

Less than three years ago, Cisco Systems launched its Unified Computing System (UCS), the first release of a hardware platform that featured tightly integrated computing and networking. After reaching 10,000 customers and an annual run rate of $1 billion, seems safe to say they were onto something.

Other major vendors have since started to deliver similar offerings, and the fact that many customers are now purchasing UCS as part of FlexPod or VCE Vblock [links to solution pages] platforms, further speaks to the huge momentum towards convergence.

Clearly, these alternatives are receiving widespread adoption because the value and benefits they deliver. However, once these converged platforms are deployed, those folks responsible for ensuring service levels can confront some significant challenges. These systems feature dense computing power, self-service capabilities, virtualized elasticity, and other attributes that pose a slew of monitoring challenges.

If your organization is looking at UCS, or has already deployed it, and you’re wondering how you’re going to track and optimize service levels, be sure to check out our upcoming webcast: Hints & Tips for Monitoring Cisco UCS. Attend and discover the best practices and requirements for efficiently and effectively monitoring Cisco UCS environments.

Facebook Twitter Linkedin Rss
Posted in Modern IT | Tagged | Leave a comment

Working with External IT Service Providers: Why and When it Makes Sense

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Andy Kicklighter

What should your IT team outsource to IT Service Providers, what should they source internally, and how do you know?

Puzzle Piece

First a couple of definitions for IT Service Provider types we’ll discuss here:

  • Cloud Service Providers – Provide SaaS/IaaS/PaaS type IT Services remotely via the Internet (in the “Cloud”)
  • Managed Hosting Providers – Host and maintain/manage specific IT Services for customers in local and remote data centers
  • Managed Service Providers – Monitor and manage systems for customers – both within the customer’s data centers and at remote locations

IT departments deliver a variety of services to their organizations. While some of these services make sense to outsource to an MSP, others should stay in house. Some of the services IT delivers, like email, collaboration tools, and so on, are critical to the organization’s ongoing operations, but they’re not a competitive differentiator. Let’s call these types of services “chore” services. Every IT department also has a long list of services and initiatives that provide, or have the potential to provide, significant competitive advantage in the market. These “core” services are the critical drivers of business success.

For an IT department, engagement with an IT Service Provider offers a great opportunity: the Service Provider can often deliver higher levels of service for chore functions—while freeing up internal IT staff to concentrate on core business differentiation. Service providers can offer the deep level of expertise in configuration and operation of these chore services that allows delivery with low costs, and with very high availability. With resources freed from these chore service responsibilities, IT can focus on that long list of projects that will really help to differentiate the organization.

There are a range of different ways IT organizations can engage with IT Service Providers:

  • An MSP may simply maintain and optimize the infrastructure you have in your environment.
  • A Managed Hosting Provider (sometimes also an MSP) may also host and maintain your infrastructure at their data center, while still running this infrastructure separate from other clients.
  • A Cloud Service Provider, Managed Hosting Provider or Managed Service Provider can deliver a monthly, fee-based service, for which they assume complete control over delivery and SLAs.

Each of these approaches has merit, and deciding which is right for you will depend upon a host of factors, including your business’ industry, relevant regulations, and the degree of infrastructure control required. The monthly fee-based approach frees organizations from having to upgrade software and maintain hardware, and puts the burden of supplying the service fully on the service provider. Many organizations, particularly small and medium sized businesses, are finding this to be a very attractive alternative.

This is why many MSPs are starting to offer cloud services, such as virtual private clouds and IaaS, to their existing customer base. Once their customers migrate to the cloud, MSPs can up-sell additional, higher level services. These services can include dedicated resources, higher levels of monitoring and management, security, and custom implementations. These offerings provide opportunities for customers to get additional value from their vendor, and for the MSP (Now also a Cloud Service Provider and/or Managed Hosting Provider), they can represent high-value, higher margin services that can boost profits. In these situations, Nimsoft Monitor is a key tool for many cloud providers, as it provides a single monitoring infrastructure that is easy to deploy, and that supports the additional systems and applications needed to provide new services.

For many IT organizations, working with MSPs and cloud providers presents an opportunity to boost user satisfaction, reduce costs, and improve services. IT effectively becomes a broker of services for the organization, and starts to focus better on delivering the core services the business needs to compete more effectively. For most organizations, services will be sourced through some combination of MSPs, Managed Hosting Providers, cloud providers, and internal staff. MSPs and Managed Hosting Providers offer the opportunity to keep IT operations working through familiar models, including local or dedicated resources, while reducing costs and improving service levels. Cloud providers offer IT teams an opportunity to replace chore services with another delivery model entirely, one that limits visibility and control, but that provides access to the latest technologies, which can pave the way for breakthroughs in agility and economics.

Facebook Twitter Linkedin Rss
Posted in MSP | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

IT Service Management: Centralize or Decentralize IT Operations?

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Tim Rochte

Centralized vs Decentralized IT Service Management

We’ve worked with many IT organizations that grapple with the question of centralizing versus decentralizing operations. Depending on organizational size and structure, appetite for risk and the strength and influence of the IT governance framework, rarely is the decision a cut-and-dry centralize or decentralize IT operations. Many IT organizations apply a hybrid approach to IT service management keeping the following risks and benefits in mind to optimize the best of both approaches.

 

Business Need

Centralized

Decentralized

Considerations
Reduce costs
  • Benefit – less redundancy; lower support costs
    		•
  • Benefit – flexibility to capture local opportunities with applications such as CRM
    		•  Experience shows that centralized IT operations have a broader view of IT costs and their impact on the bottom line. However a unified approach to IT infrastructure and platforms can enable decentralization of certain aspects IT operations.
  • Risk – lack agility to respond quickly to local opportunity

  • Risk – One size must fit all parts of the business
    		•
  • Risk – creeping IT service management costs
    		•
    Improve service delivery and uptime
  • Benefit – more simplified control of monitoring, metrics and decision making
    		•
  • Benefit – greater capabilities at lower price points; streamlined decision-making; leverage existing vendor partnerships
    		•  Improving service delivery and uptime is often tied to technological advances and process improvements. While a centralized approach offers greater control, a decentralized approach—with a centralized platform and approval process—can enable greater flexibility to add more efficient service delivery technology and provide the right metrics to continuously improve IT service management.
  • Risk – limited capabilities based on cost sensitivities
    		•
  • Risk – disparate systems add cost and complexity to monitoring; reduced knowledge sharing
    		•
    Enable business agility
  • Benefit – ensure IT service management benefits the organization as a whole
  • Benefit – localized IT solutions can facilitate the timely capture of business opportunity and spawn innovation
    		•  From an IT perspective, business agility is often a product of streamlined decision making based on greater visibility to necessary data. While it would appear that a centralized IT service management is the better choice for its broader perspective, a decentralized approach—with the right decision making authority processes in place—can be more effective at capitalizing on opportunities without compromising overall IT service management effectiveness.
  • Risk – limits adaptability to the specific needs of any part of the business
    		•
  • Risk – cost of managing localized IT solutions can outweigh the opportunity
    		•
    Ensure regulatory compliance, security and business continuity
  • Benefit – lowest risk of non-compliance ; standardized security protocols
    		•
  • Benefit – could be more cost effective to apply more robust solutions where needed instead of across the enterprise.
    		•  Guided by strong governance, centralized policy and robust audits, it is not out of the question to decentralize aspects of compliance, security and business continuity. However, policy and governance should be centralized for optimum security and compliance. This is especially true for businesses operating in regulated industries.
  • Risk – limited by technology investment in robust platforms
    		•
  • Core intellectual property and information assets could be at higher risk outside of the center function.
    		•

    Centralized approaches to IT service management, though cost effective in the short run, can result in a one-size-fits-all solution that’s not effective in larger, less homogenized organizations. On the other hand, a decentralized approach seems better aligned with business needs, but at a higher overhead cost. Hybrid, flexible approaches tend to be the most effective when core processes are well established within a strong governance framework that allows for business unit-specific flexibility. For example, while centralizing on a common infrastructure and monitoring platform, the organization can leverage configurability and even multi-tenancy to adapt the service management processes to the varied needs of the business.

    Check out our website to see how Nimsoft can help you deliver more effective IT service management.

    Facebook Twitter Linkedin Rss
    Posted in Modern IT | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

    When everybody is a CIO

    Posted on January 19, 2012 by Chris O'Malley

    It’s always been tough for IT organizations to find the right people with the right skills at the right time. It’s not just that the relentless pace of innovation is forcing IT to successfully find, recruit and engage professionals with solid skills in a whole range of technologies. The new hiring challenge is finding people who have both strong technical skills and CIO-like aptitudes for negotiation, relationship management and comparison of value.

    …Read more

    Editors note: This excerpt was taken from Chris O’Malley’s End of IT as We Know It blog for Computerworld – in this blog Chris focuses on the ever-evolving role of the IT organization. For your convenience, we will be posting weekly excerpts here on the ModernIT blog. Hope you enjoy.

    Facebook Twitter Linkedin Rss
    Posted in Modern IT | Leave a comment

    Moving to the Cloud? Here are Two Key Implications

    Posted on January 17, 2012 by Andy Kicklighter

    What’s the difference between managing your infrastructure in the cloud and managing it on site? There are many fundamental implications of moving services from on premise to the cloud, following are two of the biggest:

    Executive Walking Upstairs

    • In the cloud, the means and the level of access to performance and availability information is very different.
    • When moving to the cloud, executives need to take extra precautions in safeguarding sensitive data—whether personally identifiable, confidential, or legally protected information.

    I’ll get into each of these in more detail, but, before I go further, let me provide some quick definitions of public cloud offerings:

    • Software as a service (SaaS)—an application delivered over the Internet like NetSuite and the Salesforce.com Sales Cloud.
    • Platform as a service (PaaS)—a cloud-based development and deployment solution, such as Microsoft Azure or Google AppEngine.
    • Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)—a service delivering on-demand OS instances as needed in a public cloud. Vendors in this segment include Rackspace and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

    Varying Levels of Access to Performance Information

    Depending on which type of public cloud offerings you use, there can be substantial differences in the level of visibility you have into your cloud-based application or service, and into the infrastructure underneath it. It is very important to have accurate, detailed information on the availability of your cloud-based application or service, and a contingency plan for what happens if an issue is detected. For instance, some months ago AWS had a major outage at one of their regional operations. Customers who had implemented sound monitoring practices and failover plans were able to remain up by quickly detecting the issue and shifting operations to another AWS location. On the other hand, those that didn’t put these two key elements in place suffered from significant downtime. In some cases, businesses were effectively shut down for several days.

    In SaaS and PaaS environments, vendors will typically provide basic status information in a Web page interface, and offer usage details via a secure API. The information exposed in the vendor’s Web user interface is typically insufficient in providing a full understanding of usage and performance. To see the details required, you’ll need to monitor and manage your implementation through the API. The API layer exposes most of what you need, but you will need tools (like Nimsoft Monitor) to effectively gather and use the information. By leveraging API access and information, you’ll be able to see:

    • The vendor’s performance in complying with SLAs.
    • Global information on cloud status and locations.
    • Your specific usage data—such as the status of your instances, users, subscriptions, user experience, Web services response, storage usage, and queries.

    With this detailed view of your usage and instances, you can help ensure that your SaaS or PaaS vendor lives up to their SLAs.

    For IaaS, this picture becomes more complicated. In addition to the information exposed by the IaaS vendor via API, you’ll need additional monitoring for any tier 1 or tier 2 application you run on servers in the cloud. For example, for a production Web application or an Exchange email instance, you’ll want both detailed information at the OS level—logs, process information, performance statistics, and so on—and data collected directly from the application’s monitoring interface. This combination of system and application level visibility is similar to what you’d expect when managing the service on your premises.

    To do this, you’ll need a point-of-presence (or POP) on your severs in the cloud environment. At Nimsoft, we call this remote connection point a “Hub”. The hub provides a secure tunnel over the Internet that connects your cloud servers with your monitoring environment. The hub collects the monitoring data from the cloud-based servers powering your applications, and transmits it back to the monitoring system. (Check out this great video outlining how the Nimsoft Unified Monitoring architecture works.)

    It is important to note that, whether your organization runs services in SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS environments, you are not able to monitor the physical layer—the actual status of physical servers, storage systems, network devices, power and cooling, and other underlying infrastructure elements. This makes transaction and end user experience monitoring visibility even more important, a critical way to get an early warning of issues and problematic trends.

    Sensitive Information in the Cloud

    Another key implication of moving to the cloud is the way that personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive data needs to be handled. When running services that contain sensitive information in the cloud, executives need to be aware of the physical location of the cloud provider’s data centers, and the certifications they provide. For example, if a company is going to run a service in the cloud that includes credit card data, they’ll need the service provider to demonstrate compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.

    Managers also need to be aware of any legal constraints on the data residing in the cloud. Many countries and government agencies don’t allow the personal information of citizens to be physically stored beyond their borders, even if encrypted. Therefore, if a service desk platform is running in a SaaS environment, and tickets are being generated that include employee’s detailed personal information, for example for changes relating to employee on-boarding or termination, executives will have to take great care to ensure that the location housing the data meets all of their organization’s relevant privacy mandates and legal requirements.

    Facebook Twitter Linkedin Rss
    Posted in Modern IT | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

    Thriving in the Competitive Vortex – the Very Survival of the Enterprise is at Stake

    Posted on January 12, 2012 by Andrew Spoeth

    We received so many requests for Nimsoft CEO Chris O’Malley’s inspiring keynote presentation at CAWorld recently that we have decided to have Chris do a live webcast version on January 17.

    “Thriving in the Competitive Vortex” will discuss how the new business landscape is more dynamic than ever before, requiring IT to rise to the challenge and help drive competitive advantage in the market. In essence, we are facing the end of IT as we know it. IT must look at everything they are doing and decide if it is a “Core” or “Chore” responsibility and whether or not they are done internally or through service providers. IT organizations must prioritize on increased IT velocity, organizational agility and simplicity to thrive in this new competitive environment. Given the new competitive environment, the very survival of the enterprise is at stake.

    Live webcast: Thriving in the Competitive Vortex
    January 17, 1:00 – 1:30 p.m. Pacific
    >> Register Today

     

     

    Facebook Twitter Linkedin Rss
    Posted in News | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment