Remote Control Your Infrastructure

Most enterprises realized early on that infrastructure management wasn’t part of their core business, and outsourced it. A less intuitive discovery–that it can be managed from a remote location elsewhere in the globe–is helping many others improve service levels, and save money

For some time now, the CIO has been asked this question: "How do we best leverage what we have today?" It's a tough one. But a part of the emerging answer says: Outsource your IT infrastructure management. And this answer is gaining wider acceptance each day, driven by the need for higher service levels, and lower costs.

A Gartner study says that 32% of a CIO's IT budget goes into internal resources to service infrastructure operations and management. And this, being a big chunk, becomes the first area for some cost trimming.

Processes are often not well defined in an in-house management environment. Most companies do not have defined escalation processes, a readily accessible knowledge

base of errors and standard operating procedures. Vendors use global standard processes like the ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) and BS7799 (also known as IS07799) for security, for better management and problem resolution

Send for the specialists 



As a CIO, you're facing increasing user demands, and shrinking budgets. Your challenge is to evolve an IT infrastructure management strategy that leverages existing investments, with increased service levels for end-users, improved end-user response time through proactive management, and reduced costs and increased flexibility.

Global organizations have been able to effectively achieve these objectives by outsourcing infrastructure management to specialists. These are often offshore vendors with the expertise and experience, backed by mature processes and powerful visibility tools.

IDC estimates that over 85% of infrastructure components can be managed from a remote location. These include servers, databases, networks, security, applications and e-biz. Such remote management of these components saves companies 40% to 60% of cost of infrastructure management and operations. And gives them access to expert “skills-on-tap” round the clock.

Gartner also cites remote infrastructure management as a mega trend and forecasts that most of its customers are likely to adopt this model in the next two years.

The trend towards remote infrastructure management is largely driven by customer gains derived from these factors:

nPreemptive problem resolution: Anticipate a problem before the user brings it up. Integrated monitoring and management tools and advanced correlation tools can help achieve this and resolve problems in a faster, structured manner, reducing business losses due to IT downtime.

nVisibility and control: Remote infrastructure management makes visible the availability, performance and utilization of each component of your infrastructure. And gives you historical trend reports for capacity planning, root-cause reports for problem diagnosis and flash-check reports for availability status.



You could do parts of this on your own, with internal or third-party tools. But it’s easier to measure services from an external supplier you're paying for–with the vendor's help–versus an internal process whose resources and costs may get hidden in your system. Moreover, the expertise and competence for such measurement is higher with a specialist vendor for whom this is the core business.

nAccess to domain expertise:

Your infrastructure might need Unix and Windows experts for systems, database experts, messaging experts, web administrators and ERP experts. They're expensive to recruit and retain. Training them to stay in sync with technology developments is an additional cost. By outsourcing to a specialist vendor, probably offshore, you get a ready base of skills from all of these sources whenever you need them.

nThe quality edge: Processes are often not well defined in an in-house management environment. Variable engineer skills and approaches can mean random solutions. Most companies do not have defined escalation processes, a readily accessible knowledge base of errors and standard operating procedures. By outsourcing/offshoring infrastructure management, you can make sure that your vendor complies with processes defined by ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) and BS7799 (also known as IS07799) for security. Well-defined ITIL-based processes ensure faster problem resolution.

nA 10-fold cost reduction: The cost advantages gained in outsourcing IT infrastructure management tend to exceed even the cost advantages gained from offshore application development. Outsourcing infrastructure management has a spiral effect. It not only reduces the manpower cost of managing the infrastructure but also costs related to future infrastructure investments. Cost reductions also come from:

• Efficiency-led gains: Increasingly, offshore vendors today are mature in their processes and offerings to offer customers multiple avenues to reduce costs through headcount reduction by elimination of under-utilized resources, leveraging operations improvements from working with multiple customers and cross-pollination of best practices, and increased automation by the use of tools which are integrated to provide a common framework for operations.
• Gains through greater reporting and control: Online reporting tools help provide enterprises with real-time control and visibility into their infrastructure operations. The real-time plus historical reporting aids in capacity planning and understanding where future investments need to be made to keep operations functioning smoothly.
  
  
  
  Infrastructure management is a complex domain that needs constant attention. Outsourcing and offshoring infrastructure management lets you focus on your core business while your vendor delivers what it does best–manage your infrastructure.

Vineet Nayar 



The author is CEO of the Infrastructure Services Division of HCL Technologies, a Dataquest Top 20 company and one of India's leading software and IT services vendors