The Business Needs for Operations Management
Business needs
The need for an organization to deploy an operations management solution depends
primarily on the quality of service expected and the complexity of the IT infrastructure.
An operations management solution is essential for organizations that require:
High availability and optimal performance of systems.
Centralized management of a distributed IT infrastructure.
Effective change management and capacity planning.
High service availability and optimal performance
For many organizations, high system availability and optimal system performance are
critical business needs. For example, service interruptions and inconsistent
performance can lead to dissatisfied customers and lost revenue, placing the
organization at a competitive disadvantage. Despite all this, software and hardware
systems fail in unpredictable ways. For many IT systems, it is simply not reasonable to
expect one hundred percent uptime and flawless performance over the course of an
entire year. It is important for business decision makers to distinguish between what is
acceptable and unacceptable availability and performance. For this reason, managers of
critical systems and their customers enter into what is known as a service level
agreement (SLA). An SLA specifies the quality of service required to support an
organization’s business functions.
Operations management enables systems administrators to ensure that their
organizations’ IT infrastructures consistently deliver the quality of service specified by
their SLAs. Systems administrators can proactively monitor systems, identify potential
health issues, and quickly resolve these issues. Such preventive maintenance minimizes
service outages and performance losses and helps reduce unplanned downtime.
Centralized administration
If an organization has offices in several locations, its IT infrastructure spans a wide
geographical area. For single-point administration of such a distributed infrastructure,
systems administrators need a centralized monitoring and management system.
Operations management enables systems administrators to monitor applications,
services, and the performance levels of distributed systems from a central location. This
gives systems administrators an organization-wide view of IT health issues. If a problem
is identified on a computer, the problem can be corrected locally or remotely, depending
on the nature of the problem.
Effective change management and capacity planning
Organizations need to expand their IT infrastructures to meet growing business
requirements. The IT department must methodically scale up an organization’s IT
infrastructure so that new services are smoothly deployed.
Operations management enables systems administrators to identify IT infrastructure
changes that can increase operational efficiency and effectively implement these
changes without disrupting existing services.
In addition, operations management supports capacity planning. Systems
administrators can collect operations data over a period of time, analyze this data, and
identify performance trends. Based on these trends, system administrators can predict
the demand for IT services and determine the resources that will be required to meet the
demand.