Infrastructure Management
The concept of Infrastructure Management (IM) is not new to CIOs. Any CIO would understand that a holistic view of the IT infrastructure as opposed to the fragmented views of the network and its components (like server mangement and bandwidth management), provide a base on which the performance of IT stands.
And this difference in vision makes one company's IT department more successful than that of another, and puts one company in a better position to achieve its business goals than another.
A global CIO survey conducted by Gartner revealed that infrastructure was the number one priority for Indian CIOs in 2004. And Indian CIOs consider 'making IM more service-oriented' as their second-highest management priority.
IM Strategy and ITIL
The goal of an IM strategy is to ensure that the IT infrastructure is reliable, available on a 24x7 basis, flexible, cost-effective, and adaptable to the ever-changing IT paradigms like web-based applications and virtual offices.
These characteristics raise the issue of managing the unpredictability of technology on one hand and providing reliable and uninterrupted services to the customer on the other. However, the complexity and sophistication of IT infrastructure remain the same, irrespective of the size of the organisation. The differentiating factor is the volume of transactions and the geographic spread.
Practising IM
The practice of IM should be a continuous process, especially because it is a holistic approach that involves people, systems, assets and relationships.
Most CIOs will agree that a consultant is not essentially required to create and practise an IM strategy. A consultant is only necessary when there are certain grey areas or difficult patches in the business objective, which needs to be addressed with a technology solution.
Good IM practices can provide a number of benefits to the organisation. It can enhance system performance, increase reliability and security, utilise resources optimally, and reduce costs. These will in turn enable IT to satisfy the company's business objective.
Outsourcing Infrastructure Management - Emerging Trends
The IM services outsourcing industry will see emerging trends like :
- Autonomic computing that will help clients optimize/reduce the infrastructure costs.
- On-demand or adaptive infrastructure, the concept of 'pay as you use'.
- Features that will support confluence of all business applications like enterprise systems, document management, and workflow.
- Application monitoring, database management, and desktop support, which will be completely outsourced to a third party.
- A trend of the vendor providing network management remotely from the vendor's NOC.
Justifying benefits of IM tools - What lies beneath
Management of this IT infrastructure assumes significant dimensions when it is visualised as an enabler of business. As a consequence, the operational performance of all the supporting systems is totally dependent on the IT infrastructure.
In such a scenario it is imperative for a business to realise that payback on an IT Infrastructure Management (IM) tool is imperative. The CIO should be clear to the higher management about expected increase in productivity and reduction in costs by using the IM tool.
Companies that run critical applications and ERPs, and those with distributed nationwide locations can compare the cost of managing the entire infrastructure without an IM tool and compare it with the cost of using one.
"Many Indian organisations are also developing infrastructure management tools in-house," said Gaurav Dua, Industry Analyst - Technology Practice, Frost & Sullivan. In such cases the cost of deploying the solution and managing it is drastically reduced.
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