IT Analytics Rise Up, Take On Cloud Mantle

By A Website Design

With the growth of complexity and dynamic change impacting IT management, the need to be able to intelligently handle the overwhelming amount of collected configuration data is mounting.

Internet Evolution's ThinkerNet editor, Mary Jander, asks in her recent post "How can the intelligent processing of real-time information that's led to better business decision-making be applied to the management of datacenters?"

IT Analytics for the Modern Datacenter

Mary explains that this need should be specifically focused on applying analytics to the IT landscape and the modern datacenter. "We're not talking here just about sophisticated IT diagnostics, which continue to be offered in software and services from all major IT suppliers, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP, among others. Nor are we talking about running business analytics from the datacenter. Instead, we're pointing to IT services geared to using multiple sources of real-time data to construct predictive analytics for specific functions of IT, such as storage and server virtualization."

New Disruptive Platforms Demand Analytics

Cloud computing is literally shaking up the modern datacenter, as organizations strive to implement the operational and cost efficiencies that the cloud promises.

Mary observes that "IT professionals are ready for IT analytics; they're also ready for cloud services, which are likely to become a key vehicle for delivery of enterprise IT analytics."

Moving operations from a physical data center to virtual to a cloud environment introduces many configuration management challenges, adding complexity, growing the amount of dynamic changes and creating infrastructure abstraction. The rapid pace of change supported by the cloud platform complicates and creates challenges for enterprises.

In her editorial, Mary adds "Indeed, the combination of cloud and analytics is a heady one for vendors, who see service opportunities, not just in bringing IT analytics to customers in the form of cloud services, but in helping customers decide when and how to move to clouds and how to configure and manage clouds once they've made the transition." 

Complexity Produces Volumes of Information

The volume of information produced by complexity and diversity with many enterprises supporting a wide variety of technologies on environment spread across geographies. Furthermore, the variety of platforms add to this complexity, like cloud and virtualization.

These new developments are pushing the demand of analytics of IT data. Mary notes that "IT analytics has been a relative latecomer to the analytics party. But the interest is there. In a recent CIO survey report from IBM, the authors state: '83 percent of 3,000 CIOs surveyed said applying analytics and business intelligence to their IT operations is the most important element of their strategic growth plans over the next three to five years.'" 

Present Tools Fall Short

The IT world has a very strong IT service management, help desk, and service desk, creating strong support for the process itself in terms of work flow. Yet datacenter operators relying on CMDB solutions don't have access to real time capabilities or current information.

The tools that IT Infrastructure and Operations professionals are using to control the management process are simply not serving the process properly. They are assessing the impact of changes using application maps that are probably obsolete. Without the ability to see when changes are applied, they don't have a feedback loop on these changes and can't determine the success of application deployment and software deployment, for example. It takes too long for discovery tools to repopulate the CMDB, leaving operators unaware of changes.

Of course, because IT professionals don't have actionable information in real time or quasi real time, when there is an incident, they are unable to review changes that have been made and are unable consider whether these changes have been the root cause of that problem. 

Survey Says: Current Configuration Management Approaches Ineffective

Reinforcing this assertion, Mary referred to the recent survey results published by Evolven, where nearly 70% of a recently surveyed audience of IT professionals cited that their current configuration management approach is inadequate for meeting the needs of today's ever changing IT operations. "Evolven maintains that most IT pros don't think traditional configuration management tools can cut the mustard in these days of dynamically changing virtualized and cloud-based environments. Better tools are needed." 

About Mary Jander

As ThinkerNet Editor for Internet Evolution, Mary moderates ThinkerNet, the interactive forum where Internet luminaries can blog and exchange opinions.
Prior to joining Internet Evolution, Mary was Site Editor of Byte and Switch and a longtime Senior Editor of Light Reading. She has spent over 20 years reporting and writing on information technology and networking.
Mary lives in rural Nova Scotia, and you can see Mary in this video. Her email is jander@internetevolution.com