Infrastructure Management

Managing infrastructure

IM helps organisations focus on what's important. By Dominic K

Infrastructure management (IM) is the management of essential operation components, such as policies, processes, equipment, data, human resources, and external contacts, for overall effectiveness. Infrastructure management is sometimes divided into categories of systems management, network management, and storage management.

IM also encompasses a range of services and includes the maintenance, administration, troubleshooting and performance enhancement, of the IT infrastructure of any organisation and the entire spectrum of IT infrastructure including helpdesk, desktops, server and storage, databases, networks and security.

Although all business activities depend upon the infrastructure, planning and projects to ensure its effective management are typically undervalued to the detriment of the organisation. According to IDC investments in infrastructure management have the largest single impact on an organisation’s revenues.

That is why organisations are looking for a comprehensive enterprise management solution across networks, systems, applications and databases. IM provides CIOs with a holistic view of the entire IT infrastructure from a business perspective.

Avnish Datt, Country Manager, Orange Business Services, India says, “Infrastructure management is the provisioning and ongoing management of full lifecycle of services for the infrastructure that supports business processes. The infrastructure can be varied depending on what kind of an organisation and deployment we are talking about.”

He adds “Infrastructure management has now graduated from support and maintenance, to complete end-to-end out-tasking. We complete this lifecycle through a unique process of ‘analyse, manage and optimise’ infrastructure.”

M B Sam, Marketing Director, Sun Microsystems India says, “Infrastructure management is the management of the operational aspects of the entire technology stack in an organisation that supports the business. Operational aspects include people, processes and the tools required to monitor and manage the infrastructure. It spans areas such as systems, network and storage management.”

Various components of integration services management include assessment, design, deployment and provisioning, management such as remote and onsite surveillance with fault management services and change management.

Let the specialists in

Swapan Johri, VP, Emerging and Transformation Services HCL ISD says, “Outsourcing is not a new phenomenon, for several years companies have been working hard to reduce the cost of operating the IT infrastructure - the data centres, networks, databases, and software tools that support businesses.  The customers who were early adopters of IMS were driven by the need to focus on their core competency and give away the non core functions to service providers.  This was the genesis of some of the early service providers such as EDS and IBM.”

Tushar Sighat - Vice President, Channel Business. D-Link India says “Today enterprises have an option to build such an infrastructure on their own or out source it to a third party who has all the expertise and experience in handling such projects. It gives an enterprise the advantage of availing of a one stop shop for all its IT infrastructure needs including remote management through NOCs”

Rajendra Dhavale, Consulting Director, CA India and SAARC says, “The major areas of outsourcing are monitoring and management of WANs, backup, storage, and desktop support. A fair amount of IT security systems are also being outsourced. The core IT infrastructure elements most likely to be outsourced are server monitoring and management, network element monitoring and management, remote helpdesk services, remote NOC services, and remote technical assistance centre services.”

Anirudh Prabhakaran, COO, 3i Infotech says, “When it comes to the SME segment budget constraints do not allow the setting up of a full blown IT network and relevant applications. By outsourcing to a third party one is able to avoid the cost of investing in expensive IT infrastructure as well as the cost of training and maintaining IT staff.”

Infrastructure management framework

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. ITIL provides a cohesive set of best practice, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally. It is supported by a comprehensive qualifications scheme, accredited training organisations, and implementation and assessment tools. The best practice processes promoted in ITIL are supported by, the British Standards Institution’s standard for IT service management ISO/IEC 20000 standard previously BS15000

In short ITIL is a framework of best practice approaches intended to facilitate the delivery of high quality information technology services. ITIL outlines an extensive set of management procedures that are intended to support businesses in achieving both quality and value, in a financial sense, in IT operations. These procedures are supplier independent and have been developed to provide guidance across the breadth of IT infrastructure, development, and operations.

ITIL is becoming the de-facto method of describing best practice for the delivery of IT services. While for management reporting, Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies (COBIT) is a framework which has seen widespread adoption.

Adds Datt, “We see different frameworks being adopted largely driven by regulatory requirements and a desire to implement best practices.”

COBIT for IT governance and ITIL for operational processes are the universally accepted frameworks. Other industry standards include Data Centre Markup Language (DCML), Open Group, Global Grid Forum, Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), Object Management Group (OMG), Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and many others are being developed to help support organisations’ technological developments. While companies are becoming more standards-aware, multiple standards continue to proliferate. Thus, companies need IT management tools that are not only standards-compliant, but that also can manage across the multiple standards that are currently in use.

Enterprise demand

In the last few years companies in India have invested heavily on technology, and acquired large infrastructure to modernise their operations. This is true across industries and verticals especially in telecom, and BFSI. The demand is primarily driven by cost with a healthy labour arbitrage between currencies. The main drivers have been driven largely by a combination of business and regulatory pressures.

Adds Sam “Most of these companies are now seeing large volumes of transactions going through the newly acquired infrastructure, and waking up to the fact that any down-time in the infrastructure would directly impact their core business. In other words, organisations are waking up to the operational risk associated with infrastructure management. Therefore, they are seeking ways to reduce operational risk. This is leading them towards managed services.”

Additionally, since there is a paucity of skill sets in the marketplace that understand best-practices in managing large IT Infrastructures, and have exposure to working with sophisticated tools used for IT management organisations are well-served by looking at third –party vendors.

Sun manages infrastructure for many large customers, over 400 remotely through its control centres located at three different locations around the world viz. Ashburn, Virginia, Linlithgow, Scotland and Chennai, India.

Elaborates Johri “Largely companies across the various verticals have the same basic demands of optimisation, efficiency, 24x7 predictable performance and scalability; however there are some unique needs also that they bring on the table depending on their industry context such as pharmaceutical companies look for compliance management over and above the standard stack, BFSI companies seek greater focus on uptimes along with compliance management.”  

Sighat adds “Across all verticals the major demands were on increasing throughput, security, unified communications and new add on technologies to utilise their infrastructures more and increase ROI. Hence we saw greater penetration of gigabit switches, firewalls, IP surveillance, VoIP and WLAN. With businesses depending on the non-stop availability of IT infrastructure, the adoption of enterprise management software is on the rise in industries such as telecom, manufacturing and financial institutions.

Trends in 2006

Domestically the market was warming up to remote management services and some full scope outsourcing services driven by value and finance respectively. Though there was lot of noise about Business Service Management (BSM) we are yet to see it making some inroads into India.

To add further the key trend observed globally in IMS last year were largely three; integrated multi-service management deals gained traction; transformational benefits of IMS and lastly, the shift from large incumbent service providers to specialised vendors that offer greater flexibility in the IMS engagement.

Integrated multi-service management deals are executed through a unified structure that is responsible for the management and performance of IT infrastructure as well as applications. This integration not only reduces the response time for any kind of incidence, but also provides an aligned end-user experience to the client. All the large deals that were outsourced to India last year such as Diversified Systems Group Inc (DSGi) and Skandia were integrated multi-service engagements.

Johri, states “We have noticed gain traction is that more and more large global companies are moving away from large incumbent players such as IBM and EDS to smaller specialised players in the space and the key reason behind this movement being the lack of flexibility and control in the traditional total outsourcing model practiced by large global vendors.”

He adds “As an alternate smart sourcing option, HCL has introduced its ‘Co-Sourcing’ model which addresses the enterprises need for flexibility and strategic control from their IT Infrastructure outsourcing engagements. This model is based on a collaborative approach to outsourcing by defining it as an activity of partnership between the client and the service provider where the client retains the strategic decision making like technology refresh, policy definition and architecture issues, IT strategy etc., while the service provider takes over the day to day running of IT operations and provides recommendations on strategic aspects.”

In India, IMS is also gaining maturity and more and more enterprises are looking at the full outsourcing model where they hand over all the components of their IT Infrastructure as well as application operations to a single service provider. Plus more and more components of the IT ecosystem are getting outsourced like data lifecycle management, Managed BCP services etc, therefore maximizing the cost and efficiency benefits.

What lies ahead

Prabhakaran informs “3i Infotech will launch its framework-based solutions for Remote Infrastructure Services called i-enable. i-enable is our remote monitoring and Management Services framework, which assists the IT Operations teams to monitor the health and performance of their IT Infrastructure assets ranging from networks, security, servers application and databases”

Sighat adds “This year will see a lot of consolidation of new technologies being deployed by enterprises with SMBs continuing to be the major growth drivers in their endeavour to become organised. We will see a lot more of IT Infrastructure outsourcing trends with IT services getting stronger by the day. All these will boost revenues in new technology product lines.”

Agrees Datt, “Infrastructure consolidation will ramp up as will virtualisation. Also, as companies are looking for rapid TCO benefits, out-tasking through ‘take-over and transform’ agreements is expected in 2007.”

While T Srinivasan, Executive Director, Software, HP India Sales feels that “Infrastructure management services will continue to grow but with maturing products such as HP OpenView and services management. We also feel that business service management and application management will be an integral part of various infrastructure management services being offered. This trend was observed in 2006 and is expected to grow further in 2007”

Parameters to be analysed

IT Infrastructure is the heart of an organisation on which business works. So like you cannot let a heart problem be handled by any doctor—you will look for an experienced cardiac specialist—similarly, IT Infrastructure being the lifeline of an organisation should be handed over to a vendor with the experience of managing real-time mission critical operations.

Every CIO needs to understand the difference between total outsourcing and outsourcing of infrastructure management. The enterprise needs to ensure that they are going with a vendor who specialises in outsourcing of Infrastructure Management where the company controls new development and overall IT strategy.