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IT management-as-a-service: Trends and challenges

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Deepa
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Vamsi Krishna, lead technical architect, ZENworks, Novell

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We have been hearing a lot about everything 'as-a-service' paradigm wherever we go. Although, a lot of popular services existed in the past (e-mail-as-a-service), the emergence of virtualization and cloud technologies revolutionized the thinking behind what and how various things can now be offered 'as-a-service'.

It is not easy to ignore this revolution as it is going to influence the way in which many businesses are run across the world and how it is going to impact us as individuals in our professional and personal lives.

'IT Management-as-a-service' is a similar market opportunity that is picking up recently which aims at addressing the management needs of the devices on which modern day businesses run. In a country like India, where the majority of revenue in information technology (IT) is based on offering services, it is very relevant to understand the trends and challenges in this space and I will try to touch upon few of these aspects.

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Background

In the last few years, there are several businesses that have decided to use the power of computers to optimize businesses processes and become effective in the way they operate.

Three years ago, our domestic gas agencies were booking the refill requests manually, but not anymore. Franchise based businesses have become the most popular phenomenon and the Coffee Days, the Pizza Huts and the Megamarts are only a few examples of this big trend that is happening. If we observe closely, in all of these businesses, there are several common factors that relates to their IT infrastructure.

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All of them have several stores across the country.

They have 5-10 computers per store.

Their stores are all connected to central data center for accounting, billing and offers.

Their business is impacted if there is a computer failure.

In the world of technology, all of these problems fall under Information Technology, which is management or in short, IT Management domain. There are several ways in which these problems are solved by businesses and the most common solution would be to have IT executives, available 24x7 on phone, to troubleshoot problems encountered at the stores.

In many cases, when the problem is not understood or resolvable on phone, a physical visit to the store is mandatory and this usually means downtime which might not be acceptable. There is a growing business need for automated tools that can ease the burden to manage the devices and probably even more important is the availability of IT staff that can use these automated tools remotely to manage the IT infrastructure.

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However, having a full-fledged IT staff in house is not practical and many businesses do not consider this as 'core' to their business. For example, if a retail food market chain needs to have an in house IT staff, they will need to hire a completely different set of professionals than they were hiring earlier and will have to make huge investments into procuring the hardware for their data center.

To solve these problems, business executives are trying to outsource to service providers who offer these solutions.

Service Providers

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The IT management service providers are experts who use right set of tools to solve IT problems and take care of management of entire life cycle of devices on which businesses run.

Among other things, these service providers take care of installation of operating systems, installation of software needed to run the business, monitoring of health of the systems, patching and remediation of vulnerabilities, remote controlling devices for troubleshooting problems, conducting asset inventory to help reduce hardware and software license costs

presenting Business Dashboards that the Business Owners always wanted to see on daily basis.

Because of service providers, businesses can now concentrate on what is core to their business and concentrate on business development instead of worrying about IT management problems.

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Challenges

In the context of India, there are several service providers and the competition is very huge in this market space. The service providers have to meet strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and deliver quality of service to their clients. To excel in this market, they have several technical challenges to overcome.

1. How best to maximize returns from hardware investments done to provide 'IT Management-as-a-aervice'.

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2. How to generate IT 'Insights' to customers to reduce cost of hardware and software investments.

3. How to keep data of customers safe from disaster and meet security and compliance needs.

4. How to manage personal devices that end users bring into enterprise/business.

5. How to help employees move their settings across various devices that they use to run the business.

The following sections explain the above challenges in detail and the associated popular terminologies available in these respective areas.

Multi Tenancy

Service providers need to run as high number of services on as low number of hardware possible, to maximize their returns. This is an interesting market opportunity to management software vendors popularly branded as 'Multi Tenancy' problem.

Multi tenancy is all about using the same hardware to support multiple organizations or customers (tenants) and this usually means sharing the same servers and database investments across tenants. It is not simple to achieve multi tenancy because business applications and services, including IT management services, are traditionally developed to work with dedicated data storage and application servers.

One of the quickest solutions could be to leverage virtualization and run multiple application servers and databases on a single physical hardware. But some purists do not consider this as complete multi tenancy and the expectation is to run a single application server talking to a single database server, but yet serving multiple tenants. The good news, however is, software vendors are gearing up to this challenge and solutions are being architected to achieve complete multi tenancy.

Reporting

We have very powerful tools today to generate meaningful 'Insights' (Reports) from a single data store where the data of a single customer is stored. But with multi-tenancy, the data of one customer is interlaced with other tenants and it becomes a big challenge to generate the same level of 'Insights' without impacting 'performance' and 'security". The meaningfulness of "Insights" significantly declines with time and to solve this problem, throwing more hardware is not a solution as it going to contradict why multi-tenancy is introduced in the first place.

We need to watch out on how solutions will emerge to tackle this problem.

Compliance and Security

"Compliance" and "Security" of business data is arguably the biggest inhibition for not embracing "Management as a Service" paradigm by most businesses, as this concern is so critical that it single handedly outweighs the flexibility offered by the hosted management solutions. It requires a lot of assurances and proof of concepts from software vendors for the perception to change and hence, it is a very important challenge to overcome.

Bring Your Own Device

On a funny note, there is a prediction that the number of mobile devices in India will surpass its population in the next couple of years. With this kind of proliferation of mobile devices, employees would like to bring their own device and if possible prefer to work and run the business using their own devices. This phenomenon is popularly called "Bring Your Own Device" or in short "BYOD" and this poses serious challenges to the IT Administrators who need to support and manage these devices.

There is no single IT Management solution that solves all the problems associated with this trend as the industry is still trying to understand the growth of the smart phones and how smart these devices can be. As the permutations and combinations keep increasing, the analysts are predicting this to be the next big opportunity for software vendors to design solutions to ease the burden of IT administrators.

Profile Management

One of the associated problems in allowing BYOD in an organization is to run the business just like it used to be in the past, no matter which device is used. For example, the booking clerk at a gas company will need to get the same visual experience to perform his daily routines when using an iPad or a desk computer. Most applications like browsers are already solving this problem to an extent by giving facilities to synchronize the browser settings, history and bookmarks across various devices.

But, that is not end of it, it is just a beginning. The business applications also need to embrace the change and only then it will be complete. Naturally, this implies that "IT Management Service" industry also adopts this trend and solves the problem of "Where ever you go, your settings follow".

Conclusion

The "IT Management as a Service" as a market has arrived and whatever happens there are several trends and challenges that service providers have to solve to be relevant in this market. In a future paper, I would like to write about how Novell ZENworks, one of the leading management suites in this market space is trying to address these challenges and designing solutions.

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