Prepare for What’s Next – Part 1 of 3: Achieve Business Service Infrastructure Visibility

By obtaining insights from your business service infrastructure, you can get a head start on reopening and sustaining operations after the pandemic.

As the COVID-19 pandemic persists, there is a compounding impact on the conduct of business. Although economic uncertainty continues to be the backdrop, IT organizations have no choice but to focus on maintaining revenue streams, reducing costs and increasing resiliency to further disruption.

The business conditions brought on by the pandemic have also highlighted the critical function played by the business service infrastructure. The infrastructure enables the customer experience and underpins the move to a largely remote workforce.

To sustain revenue, IT organizations had to rapidly respond to the change in business needs, which centered on the move to a largely online mode of operation. All while reducing costs across the business. And getting it done at a rapid pace. While reducing risks.

As you know, these factors work against each other. It costs real money to maintain, enhance and improve the infrastructure. This puts IT organizations in the unenviable position of coming up with a suitable strategy for going forward.

Walking the Tightrope

Somehow, your strategy should focus on managing increased expectations with decreased budgets in a high-risk setting. It’s like walking a tightrope, and only the CIOs who are best prepared will be able to get to the other side. The key lies in the effective use of the IT operations capabilities that manage the business service infrastructure.

Here are three key areas of your common business service infrastructure to investigate:

1. Insights: You need visibility across your entire ecosystems into your infrastructure and the services it provides.
2. Efficiency: With IT operations automation tools, you can reduce complexity and consolidate tools, resulting in optimization.
3. Assurance: Using predictive IT operations analytics, you can get ahead of problems before they manifest themselves.

In this post, we’ll look at the value proposition of insights, and we’ll delve into efficiency and assurance in parts two and three.

How Insights Deliver Value

Business services today are delivered by a complex infrastructure comprising multiple distributed technology stacks. Delivering these services involves the coexistence and interconnection of a wide variety of IT operations activities. This includes monitoring, managing and troubleshooting the elements that make up the infrastructure to deliver an acceptable level of service.

It comes as no surprise that the ability to derive insights into this complex world has direct value to IT organizations. Insights facilitate everything from basic activities around fixing infrastructure problems rapidly to more sophisticated use-cases around managing the digital user experience.

There are two aspects to deriving insights that are particularly important from an IT operational efficiency perspective:

1. Full-Stack Visibility

With the infrastructure as complex and diverse as it is, gaps in monitoring visibility are a real inhibitor to business service delivery. IT operations management platforms need to have the ability to monitor the delivery ecosystem from top to bottom and end to end across your technology stacks. All downstream activities such as finding and fixing issues depend on this capability.

Typically, as the technology stack is deployed, a variety of management tools come into play. This kind of tool sprawl leads to another level of complexity and difficulty in seeing the whole picture. IT operations management platforms that consolidate functionality to provide a unified view of the full technology stack go a long way toward bringing another level of operational insights.

2. Business Impact Monitoring

This capability refers to understanding how the infrastructure is tied to the business services it supports. Again, the complexity of the technology stack that delivers the service can cloud the ability to know exactly what service is impacted when a particular infrastructure component is compromised.

IT operations platforms that have the ability to tie the infrastructure to business services drive superior levels of satisfaction when it comes to the customer experience or collaboration amongst remote workers.

Make sure your platform bridges the gap between infrastructure events and actual service delivery. It should provide real-time situational insight into business services, enabling your IT team to prioritize and address issues quickly, while limiting impact to business processes.