“Lack of visibility into the core IT infrastructure poses significant risks to data centre consolidation or migration projects, as companies are faced with the manual and time-consuming task of building a reliable picture of their information infrastructure,” said Chris Gahagan, EMC Senior Vice President, Resource Management Software. “In addition, IT departments that are unable to relate applications to the underlying IT infrastructure struggle to guarantee SLAs (Service Level Agreements) to their customers and analyse root cause problems in relation to the business.”
The survey investigated core issues enterprises encounter when implementing management solutions as part of IT service management strategy. It discovered two main themes:
IT departments are still struggling to understand how IT supports the business, which seems to be caused by a lack of visibility into the relationship between the IT infrastructure and applications
IT departments continue to rely on manual diagnosis of problems on the network, as a result, they struggle to resolve problems efficiently and prioritise resolution according to business requirements
According to the survey, while 66% of IT managers run their departments based on ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) guidelines — a set of best practices for delivering quality IT services — only 5% believe IT is a strategic part of their business plan.
Currently, ITIL is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management, delivering systematic and professional guidance to the management of IT service provision. Benefits to organisations who are adopting ITIL include: reduced costs, improved services through the use of proven best practice processes, improved customer satisfaction through a more professional approach to service delivery, and increased productivity. The recently launched ITIL v3, makes the link between ITIL’s best practice and business benefits even stronger.
“Implementing ITIL is a very long, yet valuable journey. It seems that most companies surveyed are still in the first stages, as only 5 percent feel IT is a strategic part of their business. Additionally, these results show that more than half of the surveyed managers do not have information on what applications are actively being used, or how they are related to one other and the underlying infrastructure,” said Suhela Dighe, EMC Marketing Director of EMEA, Resource Management Software. “As a result, there’s a definite need for application discovery and dependency mapping systems which can populate a company’s configuration management database (CMDB), as well as integrate with end-to-end incident or problem management.”
Additionally, the survey also revealed that 78% of respondents do not have an integrated dashboard view of their IT infrastructure. Thus, IT managers are left with analysing root-cause faults manually across their network and application domains, a significant drain on staff productivity.
“IT staffs are spending far too much time on manual root cause analysis in an attempt to find the underlying cause of incidents,” continued Dighe. “By automating the diagnosis, time could be spent preventing errors from happening in the first place.”
Additionally, results indicate that 65% of IT managers currently do not measure the cost of downtime. Without an accurate picture of how often downtime is occurring, and how much it is costing the business, companies cannot effectively improve service levels or reduce costs.
Other key findings include:
34% of respondents believe their IT system management is running on a proactive level (analysing trends, setting thresholds, predicting problems, measuring application availability, mature change, asset, configuration process)
31% said they still need to conduct manual analysis of where IT problems originate, despite that they receive “too many” warning alarms
Mean-Time-to-Repair (downtime) and business impact are key areas of concerns for IT managers
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