IT INFRASTRUCTURE & OPERATIONS

While financial analysis of IT provides valuable insight into operational efficiency, our analytics go beyond the budget to understand and compare IT's efficiency and effectiveness, enabling IT to demonstrate value to the business, leverage external markets and reduce costs. Helping  IT organizations identify and assess IT cost and performance levels against peers.

Understanding the key issues you are facing:

Modernization and consolidation. Modernization and consolidation projects offer the opportunity to assess financial goals, as well as control costs while staying competitive. We establish baseline costs, evaluating scenario options and continuous measurement to ensure success.

Cloud computing is impacting business operations. You need a framework to evaluate current and future-state goals. We help utilize a road map to analyze the efficiency and effectiveness of the strategy.

Virtualization. The technologies/techniques that make cloud viable are already making internal infrastructures more efficient and effective. We help identify your relative level of virtualization and provide comparative data for understanding the impact of decisions to implement it.

IT service portfolio looks at services in business terms, specifying what they are, how they are bundled and their benefits. Product-, process- and platform-neutral, it is an important communication and relationship management tool.

IT service catalog decomposes services into specific offerings, including chargeback methods, pricing, service-level options, limitations/exclusions and escalation commitments. Service portfolio and catalog comprise a steppingstone for the I&O organization to evaluate its cloud opportunities.

Networking. Enterprises have become more dependent on networks to conduct business, making stability a necessity; as spending increases, so does the difficulty of managing these networks. Our benchmarks cover wired and wireless networks in WAN, LAN, MAN, Internet, VoIP, local and long-distance voice.

For more details visit us @http://www.urssystems.com

Read More

CLOUD INTEGRATED STORAGE (CIS) THAT PROVIDE CREATIVE PURCHASING OPPORTUNITIES FOR CUSTOMERS

Enterprises are transitioning mission-critical workloads to public cloud storage as the cloud storage industry consolidates in the backdrop. Several recommendations are outlined for CIOs to ensure business continuity and lower total cost of ownership.

IMPACTS:

•           The cloud storage industry is failing to provide large-scale implementations to meet the increasingly sophisticated demand from customers.

• Service providers are experimenting with pricing strategies for cloud integrated storage (CIS) that provide creative purchasing opportunities for customers.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

• Align around a single cloud storage vendor whenever practical to simplify vendor engagements and CIS infrastructure customization.

• Compare CIS pricing with on-premises storage pricing by comparing usage charges and infrastructure savings. For example, when replacing existing on-premises storage with CIS, savings will be realized by the elimination of backup and disaster recovery applications meant for data protection.

• Work with CIS infrastructure vendors that have a clear service and support methodology spanning the gateway vendor, intervening networks and cloud provider. Several loose partnership relationships exist today that leave uncertainty as to who is the lead vendor.

• Define data management policies and enforcement techniques to minimize data leakage into unregulated or public domains.

ANALYSIS:

Technologies such as cloud storage gateways, WAN optimization and caching algorithms, along with pricing policies and services offered by public cloud storage providers, are all vital elements for CIS. All of these technologies and approaches are rapidly evolving and thus require due diligence by organizations intent on moving into the cloud storage arena. In addition, assembling these elements requires IT organizations to engage with a vendor community that has an uneven or developing competence. Most IT organizations are accustomed to working with a storage community largely composed of established and experienced enterprise-scale vendors such as EMC, HP and IBM. This is not currently the case for public cloud storage. Instead, as organizations move to cloud storage, they must deal with little-known startup companies or large, but new, public cloud vendors. These vendors are refining their business models, customer engagement approaches and product offerings. Given this backdrop and to mitigate implementation risk, as IT organizations consider CIS, they must pay attention to trends in the cloud storage industry and their impact on the successful addition of CIS to new or existing data center environments.

Although there are many developing situations in the cloud storage market, this research examines four impacts that affect the vendor and technology selections in this vibrant industry.

Run proofs of concept. This advice may seem obvious, but because of the newness of the CIS industry, organizations should confirm acceptable system operation by at least simulating use cases in an actual CIS environment. Cloud and gateway vendors should fully support this activity and work together to prove acceptability. Customers should avoid vendors that cannot meet this requirement.

For more details visit us @http://www.urssystems.com

Read More

Cloud Computing: IT's Driving Again

If it was once true that non-IT departments led a company's decision-making on adopting cloud, that predominance of shadow IT is no longer the case. Not only has the enterprise spend on cloud grown by 38% over the last year, IT's share of that spending now reaches 80% of the total. 

Not only is spending on the cloud growing, but it represents a rapidly increasing part of the overall IT budget. Organizations adopting cloud services expect to spend "54% of their IT budget on cloud in the next two years.

The debate over public versus private cloud "is now moot, without necessarily making it clear exactly what the outcome had been. Debating the merits of one versus the other "is insufficient to describe the complex decisions that companies are facing when selecting a delivery model," it said. In other words, companies don't expect all their needs to be met by one or other. If anything, they're mapping out a future that will include both. 

While infrastructure-as-a-service is viewed as an implicitly efficient way of running computing, only 14% of those contacted said that saving money was a primary motive for using cloud computing. Rather, 32% said the primary perceived benefit of the cloud was agility, not cost savings.

Enterprise spending on cloud has grown 38% in 2014, and IT now controls 80% of that budget, finds Verizon study.

visit us @ www.urssystems.com

Read More

CLOUD COMPUTING -- WHERE DO YOU START?

Cloud computing is a disruptive phenomenon, with the potential to make IT organizations more responsive than ever. Cloud computing promises economic advantages, speed, agility, flexibility, infinite elasticity and innovation. How will you phase your organization into cloud computing?

Key Challenges to overcome in Cloud Computing:

Cloud computing forces you to wrestle with three key strategic, operational and people challenges:

• Governance:

Cloud computing enables speed, agility and innovation. You need to move from the drawing board to deployment. Is your organization ready to adapt? You need a clear vision and effective processes, skills and organizational structure to drive cloud innovation in your enterprise. 

• Cloud Computing Environments:

You need to choose a cloud computing environment that's right for your organization. Should you consider private cloud, public cloud or a hybrid cloud solution? More and more organizations are moving services, storage, email, collaboration and applications to the cloud. You need to decide whether to choose to support private, public or a hybrid cloud mix. What's the right mix of infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS), and application (SaaS) environments for your organization.

• Security & Privacy:

If someone else is running your computers and software, you need strategies to stay secure. Your security policy depends on how many pieces you control – the more you own, the more you control. Are you ready to extend your enterprise security policy to the cloud? You need to break through the resistance and increase confidence that cloud is safe. You need to keep your data safe from prying eyes. You need your security team to buy in to your cloud initiatives. That's a tall order.

By 2015, at least 20% of all cloud services will be consumed via internal or external cloud service brokerages, rather than directly, up from less than 5% today. (source- Gartner)

Read More

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing have become fixtures in the enterprise.

Organizations are beginning to realize how profoundly a Cloud-Centric IT architecture differs from their legacy on-premises architectures and, with that, how different their management and monitoring needs will be.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud computing have become fixtures in the enterprise, and that trend is sure to continue for a long time to come. But the reality is that, to date, those gaining real benefit from the cloud at the enterprise level have been limited largely to isolated pockets.

These include software development and operations teams leveraging infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service (IaaS and PaaS) to slash costs and improve agility; sales teams licensing their own SaaS CRM systems; or lines of business "going rogue" and sidestepping IT by using apps like Dropbox to facilitate easier file sharing inside and outside the company.

There are still some fundamental obstacles to widespread adoption of cloud apps. The two biggest are security concerns and a lack of confidence in app or service performance and availability. Recently, a study was conducted asking IT teams about their current and planned use of cloud apps and services within their organizations. A few particular points stood out:

• Fewer than 20% of the survey respondents felt that their tools were doing a good job managing their cloud-based apps. The rest were at best ambivalent; more than 20% said their tools just aren't up to the task.

• More than 40% of the respondents had no tools at all to monitor and manage their cloud apps.

IT teams adopting cloud apps often find themselves in a challenging position. Their users and business management still look to them to "own" application availability and performance, even though they no longer own the application hosting environment.

The tools that they have used to manage their on-premises applications don't give them the same visibility and control in the cloud. Most of these tools have evolved alongside the on-premises applications, operating systems, server, and network infrastructure they have been used to managing.

As they adopt more cloud applications and services, organizations are beginning to realize how profoundly a cloud-centric IT architecture differs from their legacy on-premises architectures and, with that, how different their management and monitoring needs will be.

For businesses to fully embrace the cloud, they will need management tools that are designed from the ground up to support the remote, distributed nature of cloud apps and services.

For more details visit us @ www.urssystems.com

Read More

Data centre market will be driven by the revival of growth-related projects across verticals such as banking, insurance, telecom and the government segment.

India to become the second largest market for data center infrastructure within the Asia-Pacific region (source: Gartner)

Gartner has estimated that the market value of Indian data centre infrastructure will increase by 5.4 per cent from $1.92 billion in 2014 to $2.03 billion in 2015. Accordingly, India will become the second largest market for data center infrastructure within the Asia-Pacific region.

Gartner believes that the data centre market will be driven by the revival of growth-related projects across verticals such as banking, insurance, telecom and the government segment. Large enterprises are likely to invest in infrastructure replacement and growth related projects covering enterprise mobility, cloud and big data solutions. Moreover, Indian enterprises will be focusing on building intelligent data centres that focus on optimising existing hardware assets by using additional software capabilities. This will drive increased attention on newer trends such as public cloud, and integrated systems.

Within the Indian IT infrastructure market, server segment revenue is forecasted to reach $677 million in 2015, a three per cent increase over 2014. Gartner further forecasts that enterprise networking will be the biggest segment with revenue expected to reach $948 million in 2015. Data centre consolidation and virtualisation, along with cloud and mobility solutions, are the key trends influencing network purchases. The firm is of the view that there is great potential for both users and vendors to leverage some of the emerging technologies to drive growth.

Visit us at www.urssystems.com

Read More

Digital innovations are now shaking up every industry: There's a much greater sense of urgency among the mainstream players to reorganize themselves as digital businesses.

Regardless of how you view "digital disruption" -- angst-inducing threat or energizing opportunity -- it's no longer a theoretical proposition. Digital innovations are now shaking up every industry -- the result of a confluence of three main trends.

The first is a technological one. Advances in cloud computing, data analytics, video, social networking, and, most important, the consumer-funded infrastructure of mobile devices and connectivity have laid the groundwork for business as unusual.

The second trend is a more social one. The broad consumerization of IT not only has made the unwashed masses comfortable with all manner of apps and devices, turning them into ready customers of innovative digital products, services, and features, but it also has made CXOs and line-of-business execs more keenly aware of what digital innovation can potentially do to transform their companies and industries. So they're leading the charge. Whether you like it or not, CEOs, CMOs, sales executives, HR leaders, and other "non-IT" types are involved directly in setting digital strategy and making the requisite technology purchases.

The third is a commercial trend, an offshoot of the first two. The biggest digital natives are getting restless to move into new markets -- for example, the search giant Google into financial, telecom, home automation, and package delivery; the social networker LinkedIn into media and content. They now have market caps to grow and shareholders to please. They're upping their game.

As a result, there's a much greater sense of urgency among the mainstream players to reorganize themselves as digital businesses. 

Whether you're the digital hunter or the hunted, all this digital disruption requires a new brand of leadership. "Becoming a digital business isn't an 'IT project.' It requires change across the organization, from sales and customer support to purchasing and product development."

For more details, visit us @www.urssystems.com

Read More

Transforming Business Performance: As important as the network is, the applications running atop that network are even more important

Businesses are rapidly adopting virtualization, cloud infrastructure, and SaaS applications broadly across the enterprise to minimize costs and enable seamless collaboration and communication. This is significantly straining the traditional network paradigm. IT organizations globally are faced with the challenge to transform network architectures to deliver the right performance and reliability cost-effectively while retaining control.

Market forces driving change include:

• Decreasing cost and increasing reliability of Internet infrastructure 

• Growing diversity of applications, data, and devices across all networks

• Accelerated adoption of private and public cloud computing infrastructure

In a world combining public and private resources, the network itself needs to get hybrid, combining the strengths of the highly reliable Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks with the ubiquity and lower cost of Internet infrastructure. However, change towards more complex network architectures requires planning.

Top 3 IT considerations:

• Identify and Prioritize Applications: Identify, prioritize, and optimize applications to deliver the best performance. Understand application criticality by business, usage patterns and trends, and bandwidth consumption. Understand the current network delivery path and define the optimal delivery path in a Hybrid Network architecture — whether the internal Ethernet network, the wide- area MPLS network, a virtual private network or a hybrid cloud network.

• Define and Establish SLAs for Users and Businesses: Collaborate with line of business owners to identify, define, and establish right application-level Quality of Service (QoS) to ensure the right performance, reliability, and disaster recovery required for the target end users and business processes. This will influence network policies, network architecture design, and network capacity planning in relation to the cost.

• Real-Time Monitoring and Performance Management: Implement new or augment existing tools to gain application level and network visibility for real time performance monitoring to aid in troubleshooting and maintaining service level agreements (SLAs).

In aggregate, the network is more complex than ever before with the addition of hybrid networks that

incorporate the public Internet infrastructure as a way to scale corporate bandwidth cost-effectively. Supporting this architectural transformation requires IT to not only adopt new capabilities but to also

re-evaluate the existing infrastructure design, deployment, and management to maximize the utilization of hybrid resources. This perspective focuses primarily on the results of the technology like performance, reliability, and user productivity. As important as the network is, even more important are the applications running atop that network.

URS Systems also helps IT analyze the enterprise ecosystem across all network links and applications, whether extending to cloud systems or branch offices. It can analyze the most important applications affecting users and IT, from Microsoft productivity applications to accelerating applications in virtualized data centers running on VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V platforms.

For more visit us @www.urssystems.com

Read More