A Mobile App for IT Infrastructure Management? It’s About Time.
Consider the IT professional. The pressure of maintaining the uptime of the entire enterprise infrastructure constantly weighs on them, day after day. They are responsible for network and application availability and for keeping employees and customers communicating with one another, 24×7. All that, and try to have a life too.
Today it’s not uncommon for 100% of business activities to depend on the IT infrastructure. Think of ecommerce and online stores, banking and trading. IDC recently confirmed that investments in infrastructure management have the largest single impact on an organization’s revenue. The flip side of that, of course, is that if an app or service goes down, or if a connection is lost, bottom-line numbers such as revenues and operational efficiencies are immediately impacted.
Yet, according to Margaret Rouse at WhatIs.com, TechTarget’s IT encyclopedia and learning center, planning and projects to ensure effective IT management are typically undervalued – to the detriment of the organization.
Undervalued? When the bar is already set unfairly high? Faced with this set of circumstances, how is the IT professional supposed to manage? At Optanix, we dedicate a lot of time and thought to making the lives of IT professionals better. We decided that a critical way we can improve their quality of life is to give them access to their infrastructure management tools 24×7.
A couple of years ago, the number of global mobile users surpassed the number of desktop users, according to comScore. Mobile apps have evolved to the point that they are sophisticated enough to perform most of the tasks of desktop apps. The demands of the job pull the IT infrastructure professionals away from their desktops all the time. For them, mobile apps can provide critical alerting, reporting and updating capabilities.
With today’s release of the Optanix Mobile App, IT professionals are provided with anytime, anywhere visibility into their IT infrastructure.
Available for iOS and Android smart devices, the app harnesses the power of the Optanix Platform and the new capabilities of release 5.4, which became generally available today. “IT teams are frequently mobile during and after the workday,” says Kelly Ronan, Optanix Senior VP, Product Management. “The app enables them to see the whole picture, to focus on what matters and to actively remediate issues while on the go.”
With the mobile app, users and administrators can conveniently open, update, monitor and search cases, as well as receive notifications, just as desktop users do. The app features key functions of the Optanix Platform, including the Case List, Incident Dashboard, Device List and Status Table. Other features of the app include voice recognition and text to speech capabilities to support hands-free usage.
The Optanix Mobile App enables:
- More timely response and management of issues – thereby reducing Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) and business impact
- Increased visibility to the status of environments supported by Optanix ITMaaS, and the efforts that the Optanix Support Center is taking to maintain the network
- Efficient and reliable delivery of remote support in and out of normal business hours
- Improved collaboration and organizational responsiveness to minimize service impact
Security Considerations
In the same way that the web server became the infrastructure component behind web apps, the mobile app server is becoming the new infrastructure component for building enterprise mobile apps, according to Verivo. Its job is to centralize all the back-end plumbing and give IT visibility and control.
This gets development teams out of the business of reinventing security policies so they can channel all their energy towards the user experience. With the Optanix Mobile app server, security is maintained via communication with a VPN app on the device.
According to Lifewire, the advantages of mobile apps are surpassing those of native apps. For example, mobile apps are much easier to maintain, as they have a common code base across multiple platforms. Additionally, mobile apps can be manipulated to be made compatible with older mobile devices. The Optanix development team leveraged state-of-the art components in the Optanix Mobile App.
With the Optanix Mobile App, our goal is to make sure that we get the most of out of our undervalued IT professionals. And by untethering them from their desktops, maybe make their lives a little less stressful.
To use the Mobile App, customers must have their platform upgraded to R5.4. The app is now available on the Apple App Store and Google Play.