Unified IT Management

In a recent Red Hat-commissioned study to understand how unified IT management can enable efficiency and operations of heterogeneous IT environments, seven companies utilizing Red Hat CloudForms were interviewed. From these interviews IDC calculated that the companies in question would realize benefits with an average value of $11,937 per 100 users per year over a span of five years. This average value would then result in a return on investment of 436 percent. The companies were able to deliver their returns based on a 92 percent reduction in staff-time per delivery service request, and from this reduction in manual time productivity was increased. How they did it is discussed below:

There are three main challenges that we often see in today’s IT Operations environments:

1. Today’s IT Operations environments often utilize many disparate systems. That simple fact is the root of most issues, and having so many different systems leads to isolated functions, complex operational procedures and increased complexity.
2. As a result of having different environments, extremely brittle environments are becoming a norm at an alarming rate. For example, often we see the sprawl of multiple and linear permission schemes and security models making batch operations hard to focus, error prone, and at a higher risk of a security vulnerability going unnoticed.
3. Keeping up with all the different moving parts, and segmented data sources, has become so ambiguous that performance tracking concerns or identifying utilization trends becoming more of an interpretive dance than a data driven science.

From these three challenges, Red Hat Consulting’s, Matt Nolan, recommends a three-pronged approach:

• Unify. First and foremost, IT should be unified across different compute platforms by pulling in physical, virtual, cloud (both on-premise and off) and container environments, under a single pane of glass management framework.

• Get Organized. Secondly, IT should be grouped in flexibly defined collections where explicit role-based access can be defined for end user groups based on function-focused operations.

• Visualize and Monitor. Enable detailed and data-driven visualization across all the different infrastructure environments and platforms. This will help to consolidate the data for easier access and goal-oriented dashboarding along with allowing you to track trends and issues across systems, resources, functions and sites based on data and analytics.

Potential benefits to following our approach are increased efficiency, scalability, and insight. As the level of complexity is reduced following consolidation into a single-pane-of-glass management framework, operational tasks canl become easier and faster due to increased accuracy of data and analytics. This increases the overall efficiency of your environment. In addition, as the reliability of service increases, you should have a much more scalable environment. This is because of the direct result of lowered complexity of services that can now be offered to different user groups in an expanding portfolio that now has better control and risk containment. Greater levels of insight provide a data-driven understanding across all different systems. Because of a new data-driven understanding, more intelligent optimization is now possible, along with prioritization and smarter resource planning and requests.

Solving Unified IT Management

Red Hat management and automation solutions can help organizations regain IT control and insight into their infrastructure.

• Red Hat CloudForms
  • Focuses on enabling services versus managing systems so you can deliver services across your cloud environments with ease.
• Red Hat Satellite
  • The easiest way to manage your Red Hat infrastructure for efficient and compliant IT operations. Satellite provides the ability to do subscription management, content management, provisioning, patching, and configuration management.  
• Red Hat Ansible Tower
  • Provides centralized automation for teams by managing complex multi tier deployments with control, knowledge, and delegation benefits with consistency and compliance across the enterprise. Ansible tower includes Role Based Access Control, history, job scheduling, integrated notifications, inventory management, and REST API integrations.
• Red Hat Insights
  • Uses predictive analytics to check systems, provide recommendations, and help fix complex security and performance issues before they impact your systems.

Start with A Discovery Session

Red Hat Consulting offers a four phase rollout for your cloud infrastructure initiative that starts with a Discovery Session. A typical Red Hat Discovery Session starts with a focus on use cases and identification of challenges. Along with Red Hat Consulting, you can look at possible technologies and solutions and create an action plan together to address any opportunities. Red Hat Consulting is a great way to see your cloud transformation through from beginning to end, while being supported by the experts. Check out the Red Hat Consulting Discovery Session Datasheet to learn more about Red Hat’s Discovery Sessions and when you’re ready click here to talk to a Red Hat consultant.

Stay tuned to this blog for recaps of the next webinars in the five-part Private Cloud series, and remember to go here to signup for them. As always, feel free to let us know your thoughts on cloud, and any initiatives your organization might be involved in, in the comments section below.

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