IT services are very critical to nearly every business today. The only way to ensure the highest availability of critical IT services and their resources is to manage them well. These two facts imply an inescapable truth: effective management of IT systems is fundamentally important to virtually every modern organization.
Yet effective IT Services Management isn’t the entire goal. Managing a multi-vendor distributed environment is inherently complex, which means that it can be expensive. The real goal of systems management is to provide the required availability at the lowest possible cost. Doing this requires effective management of software and hardware resources. The biggest expense in systems management is typically the salaries of the people who do it, and so automating as much of the work as possible makes good sense. Using the right tools lets these people use their time most efficiently. IDIS provides the best in class of management products that help automate the most common management tasks, which also provides tools to help IT professionals detect, diagnose, and correct problems in their computing environment. Our ITSM solutions provide the needed level of proactive management and monitoring to ensure high levels of services availability and make it easy for all IT organizations to effectively manage their Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
Meeting the Management Challenges
There’s no way around it: systems management is hard. Keeping a complex assemblage of hardware and software working well every minute of every day is a tall order. And when this hardware and software are produced by various vendors and interact in a myriad of ways, the management challenge gets even harder.
The usual way to solve a complex problem is to break it down into a group of simpler problems. For IT services management, those problems include the following:
Monitoring the hardware and software in a distributed environment to detect issues
Providing tools to fix those issues. Doing this well means more than just responding to outages and other incidents. It also requires monitoring the health of systems to prevent problems before they occur.
Automating the time-consuming process of installing, updating, and patching software.
Other aspects of system configuration might also be automated, such as:
Maintaining up-to-date descriptions of the hardware and software in the environment.
Providing implementations of standard processes for systems management. Rather than taking a purely technical view, IT organizations increasingly view systems management in terms of what IT provides to the business as a whole. Commonly known as IT Service Management, this perspective relies on a process-oriented approach. Offering automated support for common management processes, such as those defined by the IT Information Library (ITIL), can improve the quality of systems management. n Handling backup and restore of critical applications and data is essential to guarantee business continuity. Given how complex IT environments become, an effective Disaster Recovery plan is provided to ensure the availability of mission-critical systems. n Addressing the monitoring and configuration requirements of smaller organizations could become cost prohibitive. The specialized tools used by large organizations can be too complex for firms without full-time management staff. For situations like this, a simpler, more unified approach is provided to cope with these challenges. n Sizing installations properly by providing tools for estimating the required resources. Capacity Planning is especially important for mission-critical applications such as electronic messaging, but it’s also useful in other areas.
IDIS has chosen to group the best systems management technologies and integrate them together, exploiting wherever possible the commonality that exists across these diverse problems. The services provided by IDIS management solutions’ are aimed at improving IT’s ability to meet an organization’s business demands while still lowering the costs of managing its computing resources.