By Tom Schmidt
The demands on today's data centers have never been greater. Data volumes are growing approximately 50% each year, and information and applications must be protected and available at all times -- with no concessions for downtime. Now factor in these realities:
- IT budgets and staff levels are essentially flat.
- Complexity is unprecedented. Institutions must manage multiple server platforms, storage devices, virtual machines, databases, and applications -- all with their own proprietary tools.
- It has been estimated that as much as 70 percent of IT budgets are spent simply to keep the existing environment up and running. IDC estimates that IT complexity costs firms over $750 billion every year.
- CIOs and CEOs don't want IT to just keep the lights on -- they want IT to be converted from a cost center into a driver of competitive advantage.
Financial institutions struggling to maintain discipline over increasingly complex data centers should seriously consider IT Service Management (also known as Utility Computing, Agile Infrastructure, the Agile Enterprise, and Real Time Infrastructure). ITSM is a customer-centered approach to managing IT systems, especially at large enterprises or where IT is mission critical. If carefully planned and implemented, ITSM offers institutions a way to deliver and demonstrate genuine business value from their data center investments.
This article provides an overview of ITSM, and of the data center solutions required for an effective implementation.
Creating business value
There are many frameworks for establishing ITSM disciplines at an organization. The most widely accepted is the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework managed by the United Kingdom's Office of Government Commerce (OGC). This library, revised and updated since the 1980s, provides "best practices" guidelines and architectures to ensure that IT processes are aligned with business processes and that IT delivers business solutions that are both consistent and useful.
In general, ITSM frameworks concentrate on creating business value through IT processes that manage incidents, configuration, change, releases, capacity, availability, and service levels. Standardizing and automating these processes account for much of the value organizations realize by implementing ITSM.
Automated solutions that support ITSM implementations include:
- Configuration management (to replace "accidental architectures" and fragmented processes with consistent, scalable, business-focused alternatives)
- Performance management (to link the quality of business services to the individual IT assets and tiers marshaled to provide them)
- Provisioning management (to replace patchwork global infrastructures with consistent deployments that support process disciplines)
- Incident and service-level management (to monitor and ensure business-relevant performance along the entire application transaction path from infrastructure assets through Help Desk services)
- Storage management (to organize unique and complex storage processes)
Taking a customer's perspective
ITSM takes a customer's perspective on IT service delivery. Business value measured at the customer interface is traced back along the value chain, instead of forward from infrastructure investments to the delivery point. ITSM's focus on customer value helps IT "talk business," delivering:
- IT service improvements, such as consistent performance to agreed service levels with minimum disruption and risks that are appropriately minimized and managed
- IT process improvements, including operational best practices, with all the information needed to support and document compliance to appropriate standards
- Standardization of IT infrastructure and processes, to reduce costs, complexity, and time-to-value of new investments in hardware, software, utilities, and personnel
Implementing ITSM
Most IT organizations have several elements of ITSM already in place, and the principles of ITSM underlie many mature data center management practices. While no single approach will be right for every data center, the sequence outlined here can be adapted to fit the needs of many financial institutions.
Phase 1: establish control
ITSM demands that constantly-changing infrastructure and data center configuration be brought under control and the root causes of recurrent problems identified and addressed. Without these steps, shifts in the foundation and constant firefights will frustrate attempts at ITSM discipline. Most organizations will choose to implement configuration management first to establish a baseline and then implement change management to gain visibility of the dynamic environment. Problem management helps keep recurrent problems at bay and delivers early benefits to end users to help solidify management buy-in.
Phase 2: build on the foundation
Once the foundation is in place, managers can turn their attention to forward-looking components of ITSM. Measurement and management of service levels and formal incident management processes focus on requirements, resolutions, and service levels as seen by IT end users. In this phase, users should begin to see real changes in the performance of the systems they use, with faster and more accurate resolution of departures from promised service levels.
Phase 3: steady-state ITSM
This phase adds ITSM elements focused on maintaining and improving steady-state performance for the future. For example, release management ensures that software and server rollouts are smooth, both technically and in terms of end-user expectations. Availability management sets up continuous improvement of IT services as measured by repeatable, reliable measures.
Conclusion
As financial institutions increasingly realize, managing today's complex web of servers, applications, and storage with point management applications is no longer cost-effective. Such fragmented solutions are labor intensive, tying down valuable staff with record keeping and cutting into productivity. When a business needs to scale or change, fragmented solutions impair agility and growth.
Tom Schmidt writes frequently about information security topics. He has more than 15 years' experience as a writer and editor in high-tech publishing.