THANKS TO EVOLVEN, WHAT TOOK WEEKS NOW TAKES HOURS OR LESS.
CHALLENGES: DOWNTIME. LONG MTTR. COMPLIANCE RISK.
VSE's IT plays a strategic role in meeting VSE's business objectives. It's critical for VSE's IT operations team to be very responsive to changing business requirements, while at the same time making sure they're able to maintain strong control over the IT environment.
The biggest challenges for VSE's IT team is investigating incidents and identifying their root cause. VSE counts on their IT functions to help make this process easier and faster. However, due to the complexity and dynamics of IT, investigating these complex incidents became more painful, time-consuming and labor intensive.
In 2012, VSE underwent significant changes when it moved its offices and built a brand new state-of-the-art, fully virtualized data center. As the servers were virtualized and copied to the new data center, VSE needed to verify that all servers deployed accurately and consistently, and no data was lost during the transformation. With no automated tool to verify deployment and consistency, VSE faced a major risk for environment stability.
To complicate things even further, as VSE subjected to SOX and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) regulations, auditors visited regularly, asking VSE to validate changes in the data center to stay compliant. Meeting compliance was a long, labor-intensive manual process that took multiple IT managers several weeks to complete. According to VSE's Vice President and CIO, Dave Chivers, "the process of validating changes is like looking for a needle in a haystack and not knowing where to start."
EVOLVEN IT OPERATIONS ANALYTICS SOLUTION
VSE implemented Evolven IT Operations Analytics solution to help them make the data center transformation smooth and risk free, cut incident investigation time, and help VSE stay in compliance effectively and efficiently.
Smooth, Risk-free Data Center Transformation
For IT operations, especially when facing a large transformation project, ensuring servers and environments remain consistent is a formidable challenge. Evolven allows VSE's IT operations team to:
- Easily compare servers and business service environments.
- Identify and report inconsistencies and critical differences.
- Compare multiple environments at once.
- Intelligently analyze inconsistencies to highlight those that can create significant issues.
- Get automated consistency reports.
Cutting Mean-Time-to-Resolution
When incidents occur, VSE's IT operations team can now turn to Evolven to quickly identify configuration changes and differences that are at the root cause.
"With Evolven, now automation catches in minutes what a manual check would take considerably longer to do," said Chivers.
With Evolven's innovative IT Operations Analytics software, VSE's team can more easily, quickly and seamlessly analyze the problematic environment to identify the granular changes or discrepancies that might have triggered the incident. Using Evolven, the VSE's IT operations team can:
- Detect what has changed to trigger an incident.
- Analyze differences between working and non-working environments.
- Analyze differences against a golden baseline.
Maintaining Compliance Effectively and Efficiently
Thanks to Evolven, what used to be a source of major interruption to VSE's IT operations, has now turned into an easy, fast, seamless and accurate automated process.
Evolven keeps complete, detailed traceability of all changes as well as an automated audit trail, so now maintaining and providing compliance takes just minutes - a tremendous improvement over VSE's former systems and methods.
RESULTS: MORE UPTIME. LESS DOWNTIME. MORE EFFICIENCY.
Improving system uptime and performance
Previously, it would take VSE's IT team weeks to investigate and resolve an incident, but now using Evolven's analytics technologies, problems are traced and resolved in minutes significantly increasing system availability and improving performance.
Reducing risk of downtime and errors
Using Evolven's analytics solution, VSE was able to make a smooth and successful transition when it moved offices and built its new data center in 2012.
Evolven allows VSE's IT managers to continue to ensure 100% consistency of servers and environments - able to easily and efficiently identify the root cause of any changes and maintain complete control of the IT environment 24x7.
Improving efficiency
One particular compliance audit was worth the entire cost of the Evolven product. When the auditors went in to investigate, they asked VSE to validate that they had not changed a specific file. It took VSE minutes to find an accurate answer, using Evolven, where in the past it would have been a huge, arduous, time-consuming process.
"Not only are we extremely happy with how well Evolven's technology works, but appreciate working with our designated experienced and knowledgeable customer service rep," said Igor Duenas, Sr. Systems Designer Engineer.
About VSE
VSE has been providing professional services for the government since 1959, with an emphasis on department of defense contractors. Based in Alexandria, VA, VSE has provided more than $2 billion in diversified engineering and technical support services to the U.S. Government and has been ranked among the top 100 defense contractors, top 10 foreign military sales contractors, and top 50 Navy contractors in the nation. More about VSE at www.vsecorp.com