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‘X-celerate’ your enterprise

To protect business operations, enterprises must protect core functions running not only on their internal networks, but also those running on the public and private networks to which they are connected, says Ashok Waran.

An X-celerated enterprise automatically bridges the critical IT operations gap between the endpoint management, or control of the myriad of desktop or mobile computing devices and related applications within a large enterprise, and the end users who depend on them for efficient business processes and personal productivity.

Until now, risk mitigation strategies have focussed on guarding internal IT resources, such as Web servers, database servers, or PCs. But globalisation, the extended enterprise, and service-oriented architectures have changed the IT landscape. Web services and partner communications now tie businesses together in a complex, worldwide network. Every day, business transactions involve network nodes around the world—including intermediaries that may have been selected automatically just seconds before they were used. In this hyper-connected world, any strategy that focusses on simply securing a limited pool of devices will prove dangerously myopic.

Comprehensive is competitive

To protect business operations, enterprises must protect core functions running not only on their internal networks, but also those running on the public and private networks to which they are connected. Today, business functions run on local servers, desktop systems, and on other systems far beyond the reach and scrutiny of the internal IT team. All these systems—local and remote—are broadly accessible, increasingly complex, and continuously prone to attack.

Business functions that depend on networked services are vulnerable to malware attacks, data interception, data corruption, and traffic misdirection. A great deal of planning, vulnerability assessment, and flawless execution of risk mitigation strategies is imperative if you want to retain the competitive edge.

The proliferation of mobile and remote users is resulting in an increasing issue of important company data existing unprotected and outside the central IT function. Busy users forget to backup their systems or bring in viruses that they picked up on some other remote network. With the spread of broadband, a further issue arises with the potential security risk of transferring data over public telephone lines. Standalone hardware-based solutions are available but what works best is a fully automated, software solution that does not rely on user intervention.

A system crash inevitably means loss of time and money! The more comprehensively you deal with system and network vulnerabilities, the better it is for your business.

Meticulously manage the ‘endpoints’

Across varied organisations, IT departments must be able to manage virus attacks—before, during or after incidents occur. As a result, IT staff must be better equipped to ensure that computing endpoints are always working and available to the end-users.

Analysis and testing functionalities are critical; they enable IT staff to check for known incompatibilities and prioritise test routines. Quantitative and qualitative information must be analysed to determine which desktops should be prioritised for upgrades. Real-time changes during compliance and version upgrades must be remotely targeted, based on explicit information gathered during the discovery phase or implicitly, using rules-based criteria.

While securing endpoints in your network infrastructure, you also need to look after other factors such as cost of ownership and return on investment for network equipment. Increasingly, technology is providing enterprises with some useful capabilities. One of these is a move away from tedious, error-prone, manually-intensive operations to software-assisted, automated end-to-end operations.

The need of the hour from a solutions point of view may well be a suite of products that are designed to provide a continuous, seamless approach for IT operations management from one vendor, starting at the endpoint and moving to self-service—and beyond—to assisted service. Functionality for real-time asset discovery, software compliance and enhanced patch distribution are all key success factors towards successful endpoint management. Remote automated diagnosis and repair of problems once identified are critical to justify returns on investment in such technologies. Enabling personalised, voice-assisted automated support when the end-user is disconnected from the network is a useful value-add.

Communication ties it all together

Another perspective is to go for software that enables communication with end-users, through a self-service portal, where they can pull up-to-date information on the status of updates, receive scheduling announcements and automated fixes if needed. Providing sophisticated means of communication also helps remote users feel like they are part of the network. They are more likely to follow IT-related instructions, ask when they have a question, and seek solutions proactively before a simple glitch leads to a massive crash.

In such cases, the end-user must be able to easily and intelligently escalate from a self-service environment to an assisted service solution if required. The capability focus (of the software) must be on built-in knowledge automation, context-sensitive solutions, convenient updation, and easy ‘one click fixes’ for the end user.

Providing the ability for the end-user to create an automated request for assisted service is important to overcome situations where users are not able to solve the problems by themselves. Users can gain fast, personalised answers to their questions; the IT organisation can avoid the high cost of unnecessary calls to the help desk and free their support analysts to more effectively handle complex problems.

Towards the ‘X-celerated enterprise’

What is needed is the vision for an X-celerated enterprise.

IT management can more dynamically identify issues throughout a company’s technology infrastructure, more accurately diagnose their cause or impact, remotely provide an automated resolution for either the endpoint or the end user, and create one, integrated management view of its IT operations. The result is that enterprises can avoid unnecessary costs, reduce downtime, sustain automated processes, and ensure business continuity.

Within the X-celerated enterprise, there are no competing organisational agendas and IT endpoint management is linked with end user service.

The impact of this unified approach to IT service delivery can be profound, enabling enterprises to:

• Avoid costly, enterprise-wide IT problems before they occur n More accurately diagnose and resolve problems ranging from one to tens of thousands of computing endpoints
• Simplify remote administration of desktop or mobile endpoints
• Accelerate the speed of business processes and respond to IT issues in real time
• Benefit from a common, automated problem resolution software platform, and
• Reduce a range of IT infrastructure management costs.

Finally, it is also important to technologically empower IT support staff. Provide support representatives with software, specifically designed to speed problem resolution. Built-in knowledge automation should enable analysts to access, author or publish current solutions via a support knowledge base. A robust solution’s capabilities must include functionality for live chat with end users, remote management of the end users’ computing system for problem diagnosis plus push-based, Web-delivered solutions, and automated assistance for targeted problem diagnosis.

The end objective has to be a powerful set of easy-to-use diagnostic tools for support analysts, enabling them to better resolve problems quickly—and on first contact! This is the true test of an X-celerated enterprise.

The author is Vice-president, SupportSoft India.

He can be reached at ashok.waran@supportsoft.com