One can spend a lot of money on IT. One CEO of an outrageously profitable financial services firm (who shall remain nameless at the risk of losing my head or shares) is known to say, despite the climbing profit, “we spend too much on IT.”

Alas, investing in the future is seen as desirable for some companies. But can we at least control the investment?

“As if bracing for each new technological development isn’t challenging enough, the IT function is further ex­pected to manage and implement these changes in an orderly “best practices” manner to help ensure continu­ity of IT deployment in all appropriate business pro­cesses,” states the Enterprise Management Associates’ white paper Service Management Made Simple For Mid-Sized Organizations. “This approach has ushered in the era of service management, where applications are viewed by end-users as utility-grade services available to authorized users throughout the networked company, rather than as siloed, discrete applications unique to individual users and departments.

The paper, prepared for Raritan, a supplier of solutions for managing IT infrastructure equipment, highlights the key attributes of an effective IT management service strategy:

• Integration – support a breadth of functionality (e.g., security, network management, application performance) from a single management view rather than requiring multiple monitoring tools and interfaces.
• Management of changing environments and conditions – Service management processes detect changes in configurations, new devices, applications and networks, sudden shifts in traffic flow or routing, denial of service attacks and other random or unexpected threats that can create havoc within any IT infrastructure.
• Modular deployment – A modular approach provides the best of both worlds – enabling an integrated, holistic management strategy that can conform to best practices, while enabling flexibility and choice in making management investments. Well-designed modular solutions should also be easy to deploy.
• Resilience and reliability – The design objective of service management best practices is to be adaptive to change, and since they are based on defined standards of performance, functionality and management, they are also highly reliable.

Of course, one of the keys is reporting and alerts including alarms and reporting on time to repair and time between failures.

Ultimately what Raritan and others in this space are selling are command center systems (NOCs) that integrate and monitor your infrastructure (“centralize the management of more than 10,000 devices with only one IP address”).

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