Refurbishing The Enterprise With IT Health Checks

In a very insightful interaction with Biztech2.0, Vikas Arora, group director, Enterprise Services, Microsoft India, scans the IT health check and support horizon.

With the recession showing no signs of easing down, how are CIOs keeping their IT infrastructure together?

In this tough market environment, the pressure on CIOs to keep their IT systems available, reliable and constantly performing in a cost-effective manner is evidently more intense than ever before. Consequently, aspects of cost optimisation and deriving maximum value from the IT infrastructure have become priorities for CIOs across organisations. To achieve this, we see CIOs focusing on leveraging the benefits of:

• Virtualisation: As organisations become increasingly focused on cost reductions, improved application performance, energy efficiency, infrastructure consolidation and easily manageable IT systems - virtualisation technology is emerging as a key business enabler in enterprise scenarios

• Green IT: IT users have today become more conscious of the need to deploy environment-friendly and energy-efficient systems. Apart from the established environmental advantage of Green IT practices, organisations in the current economic situation are beginning to acknowledge the contribution of Green IT in helping them drastically reduce IT costs.

• Cloud Services: The market is experiencing an increased understanding and inevitable hype around the advantages of using the cloud computing model. Cloud Services are emerging as an extremely viable approach to deliver and access enterprise software and services.

With limited budgets and stalling projects, how can CIOs benefit from proactive IT support?

The current market situation actually makes a stronger case for proactive IT services. According to Forrester Research - on an average, any given company spends over 70 percent of its IT budget on maintenance and operations, with a mere 30 percent of IT investments left to be dedicated to fresh projects.

In organisations that use proactive IT services along the entire life cycle of their technology investments - a good portion of the 70 percent maintenance and operations budget can be saved and re-directed to new initiatives. Additionally, when CIOs spend that 30 percent on new IT projects, they face multiple challenges and failures before they finally set the implementation on track. In such cases, by handholding CIOs through the design, development and implementation phase of new projects - proactive IT support can play a big role in helping CIOs anticipate challenges before they arise. This enables effective and timely delivery of fresh IT projects, thus improving final business outcomes.

Therefore, by investing in proactive IT support services, CIOs can garner huge cost savings that can in turn be used to fund new IT investments and initiatives.

How important is it to get an IT health check done and at what intervals should it be done?

IT Health Checks proactively diagnose and analyse the data collected and provide customers with recommendations based on best practices to help avoid problems in the future. It is recommended that enterprises should conduct IT health checks once or twice a year, depending on the complexity of their IT operations and size.

What are the advantages of an IT health check?

According to Forrester Research, it has been found that proactive IT services and support help organisations drastically reduce downtime, save costs on re-work and improve mean-time-to-repair. This has been found to enhance an organisation’s business reputation, speed to market, customer service and overall profitability. Specifically, key customer benefits of IT health checks include:

• Problem Identification: Helps identify symptoms or potential problems of server before they impact production.
• Review Process: Reviews critical processes to achieve minimum downtime during disaster recovery
• Data Analysis and Reporting: Diagnoses and analyses the data collected in order to make recommendations based on the best practices
• Trouble Shooting: Understands server functionality and troubleshoot failures
• Warning Identification: Identifies warnings that might be adversely affecting users
• Common Problem Comprehension: Understands common problems and mistakes made by administrators
• Supportability Comprehension: Understands supportability best practices.

What part of the IT budget do you think should be allotted to IT health check?

According to Forrester Research, in the past six years alone, IT budgets have risen from an average of 2.3 percent of revenue in 2001 to an average of 4.1 percent of revenue world-wide. Even while hardware cost/ performance has quadrupled, the percentage of IT budget allocated to Operations and Maintenance remains at more than 75 percent. While a mere 2 percent of IT budgets is allocated to proactive IT services and health check.

How can CIOs use IT support to make sure that their IT systems are available, reliable and performing constantly?

Each firm deploys, uses, and retires its technology along a predictable lifecycle. Deriving the best value from technology investments means recognising the fact that at certain stages of the technology lifecycle - investments need to be made to ensure the business operates at high quality, with speed and flexibility, and within a reasonable cost structure.

Fixing IT-related problems after they arise is not only time consuming and expensive, but also short sighted and highly risky. Given the importance of technology to the business and the ever-increasing visibility and exposure of customers to that technology - investing in proactive services is a crucial component if the business is to survive and thrive.

Rather than being performed one-time or on an adhoc basis, we believe that IT support services should be an inherent part of every CIO’s IT architecture planning and sustenance programme. This should be a proactive and ongoing process that can be anticipated and planned for by CIOs.

What kind of support should CIOs look out for to keep their systems up and running?

CIOs must look for end-to-end solutions that help them maximise IT resources, provide reactive solutions, provide proactive support, enable readiness and provide advisory help on strategic issues.

What are Microsoft’s offerings in this space?

Microsoft Premier Support Services provides four levels of Premier Support to customers today - Foundation, Standard, Plus, and Mission Critical. Here is a brief description of these offerings:

• Foundation - A value-priced, entry-level solution for those needing a basic support relationship.
• Standard - A comprehensive, personalised support through a designated Microsoft contact for organisations with more complex technical needs.
• Plus - For organisations needing extensive proactive services and problem resolution support.
• Mission Critical - For organisations with mission critical needs with tracked response times.

What are Microsoft’s future plans for IT health check and support and how is it looking to increase its market share?

Some of our plans here include improved focus on service offerings like enhanced mission critical support and Tier 3 support to provide our customers direct access to expert skills. We will also be launching a continuous health check offering aimed at automating IT health checks through periodic collection and review of information remotely. On the anvil are also security assessment programmes based on current customer feedback and needs.

What do you see as the future of this market and some trends in this space?

From our recent market experience, we have witnessed an accelerated customer demand for proactive services, where CIOs are starting to acknowledge a definite proclivity towards preventive services rather than reactive support. Customers are increasingly adopting proactive IT services and not just ‘break-fix’ services to address problems only when they arise. Some key factors and trends, which would strongly influence the adoption of proactive IT services in the near future are:

• Increasing size and complexity of the IT set-up with greater business demands
• Move to the Web adding vulnerability and visibility
• Growth on system interdependencies and interfaces
• Advent of new technologies like SOA, Green IT, cloud computing, virtualisation and convergence in telecommunications technologies

Going forward, we see that planned investments in proactive IT services will become a pre-requisite for all large enterprises and a crucial component of any CIO’s plans.