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Top Five Reasons to Adopt IT Operations Analytics

By June 30, 2014Article

The IT industry is ever changing with ever more technologies arising to help IT operations departments support expanding platforms and technologies for evolving business services. Further, the continually increasing volume, variety and velocity of data — and data change — coupled with the underlying infrastructure complexity has created an overwhelming challenge for IT operations. IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) solutions are emerging to redefine how IT operations maintains performance, availability, as well as security and compliance. 

According to Gartner, Global 2000 companies will deploy IT Operations Analytics platforms as a central component of their architecture for managing critical applications and IT services. These platforms will take data feeds from new and existing monitoring tools and help IT make more sense of the exploding volumes and variety of data while aligning to the business services they support. 

The goal of ITOA solutions is simple: allow companies to quickly, easily and continuously understand the quality of IT service delivered to business end users before any issues arise and while controlling overall costs. The business needs to understand — and proactively resolve — any IT issues long before clients or employees start calling the help desk … or moving on to a competitor! 

The adoption of IT Operations Analytics is emerging in the industry; but as with all new approaches, there are nascent doubts as to why ITOA solutions should be adopted. 

Here is my take on the top five reasons why companies should adopt IT Operations Analytics. 

1. Reduces risk 

Risks — especially service availability and performance — have an enormous effect on revenues including fines, reputation degradation and customer satisfaction or retention on the line. Proper ITOA can help you accurately predict which services are and aren’t running as they’re supposed to, long before services are put at risk. 

For organizations not employing ITOA the risk is increased as ever more IT services are implemented across multiple, disparate IT technology platforms (virtual and physical). 

2. Ensures performance 

Today it’s all about keeping the lights on! IT is tasked with supporting the business with an “always on” mantra for IT service delivery performance. “On” means more than just “not dark”; it means the proper experience for clients and users in terms of business response time (latency) and throughput (work being accomplished). 

Rapidly changing applications are running on increasingly dynamic platforms with ever more shared resources underneath creating opportunities for performance conflict. This pace means organizations must be able to understand how to plan, predict and manage the performance needs of its customers, in the ways they consider critical: response time and throughput. 

3. Scales across dynamic environments

The dynamic world of virtualization and cloud has completely destroyed all previous approaches to optimizing IT in support of business outcomes. ITOA provides a measured approach that includes automated, intelligent analytics that simultaneously realize the promise of today’s virtualized everything environments, while automatically adapting and tracking the relationships between business services and the ever-changing IT resources supporting them. 

4. Aligns dynamic performance and capacity with finance 

It’s important that companies spend available money wisely. Understanding IT and cost data can help planning of future services and drive additional efficiencies by preventing unnecessary IT investment. ITOA shows how business processes and services can be flexibly and affordably supported, linking the key relationships between life cycle costs and the appropriate (enough but not too much) IT resource to support those services. 

5. Adapts to variety 

IT organizations must have a continuous improvement process that spans across all the disparate — and changing — elements of infrastructure that sustain services. Using narrow, silo-focused point solutions with no commonality or frame of reference is inefficient at best. An ITOA approach that breaks down traditional technology and business silos, ensuring a common approach across all elements of IT resource in support of business services is key to continuous optimization. 

IT Operations Analytics tools are coming to the forefront as a powerful solution for IT departments to be able to bolster their arsenal and filter through an enormous amount of data/metrics to glean better business and technology insights. Companies owe it to themselves to investigate the IT Operations Analytics arena to better learn the myriad and compelling benefits. 

Make the right decisions, at the right time to cost-effectively optimize your business while ensuring acceptable service. Turn too much data into the right amount of predictive business information using ITOA! 

Dave Wagner is director of market development at TeamQuest. He has more than three decades of systems hardware and software experience including product management, marketing, sales, project management, customer support and training. He is responsible for the successful business integration of TeamQuest Surveyor. He has authored many articles on the topic of capacity management and has presented at CMG, AFCOM, Pink and other industry events. Visit Dave on Twitter and YouTube. 

 

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