The three biggest priorities for I&O leaders in 2021

Gartner’s analysis of their 2021 IT Score for I&O highlights the areas which I&O leaders feel are of high importance, but which are currently lacking in maturity. Using these insights, we can uncover the activities which will help you to mature in the three highest-priority areas:

1. I&O Performance monitoring
2. Automation of operations
3. Future service availability. 

Gartner subscribers can download the full report here, but I’ll summarise the key points below and provide some concrete, strategic, actions to amp-up your maturity.

1) Monitoring I&O performance

The problem:

How can you monitor what you don’t have visibility of? How can you measure performance when metrics are being collected in multiple tools in multiple ways and being displayed in multiple locations? This bottom-up view won’t give you the holistic perspective you need to turn insights into action which will benefit your whole estate.

Steps to maturity:

Cloudsoft AMP enables you to set the KPIs, define service levels, and provide real-time reporting at application level. Visualisations enable stakeholders to see what they need to see, when they need to see it. 

Download the model here.

2) Automating operations

The problem:

With ambitious automation goals, I&O leaders can often struggle to prioritise automation opportunities. Coupled with the shifting balance towards cloud, it can also be difficult to effect change towards an automated environment within infrastructure teams. 

Steps to maturity:

Cloudsoft AMP acts as an ‘electrical conductor’, going beyond the opportunistic use of automation for repetitive tasks to enabling automated management of your hybrid IT estate. Move from task-based automation to policy-based automation which can be easily replicated across multiple workloads in any environment.

Download the model here.

3) Ensuring future service availability

The problem:

Unexpected downtime is expensive. With complex estates, it can take hours to diagnose an issue, nevermind fix it. You also need to be able to test the resilience and availability of your systems and demonstrate compliance to regulators.

Steps to maturity:

Cloudsoft AMP acts as a ‘Train conductor’, not only mapping and monitoring your estate for full-visibility, but automating comprehensive service and recovery testing and enabling you to map business services to your infrastructure. Read how a Global Bank slashed downtime from 84 hours to just 5 minutes per year, using Cloudsoft AMP.

Download the model here.

A strategic solution to amping up your maturity.

To strategically move towards a mature strategy, you have to take a top-down, application centric view of your estate. Focus on the solutions you’re trying to deliver, not the infrastructure or environments you are running them on. Hybrid digital infrastructure management tooling can only show you so much - and, to borrow Gartner’s analogy, they often add to the noise rather than bringing harmony. 

But we’re not looking for another band member!

I know, this sounds like asking you to add yet another drummer to the band. But consider that until now your tools have been playing their own tunes, at their own tempo and in their own key. Imagine the noise!

A DPC sits above your estate, orchestrating and conducting your workloads, their availability, new deployments, management of infrastructure and more.  Key to DPC tooling is the ability to not only consistently measure performance, but to provide holistic visualisations of digital platform performance in an accessible, stakeholder-friendly format. What makes these tools so powerful, and so key to maturing towards your strategic priorities, they can not only play with everyone, but make sure the whole orchestra is performing in harmony. That’s why these tools are Conductors.

Book a guided trial of Cloudsoft AMP 5.6, to tame the noise of your IT estate.