MONITORING ASCERTAINS IT PERFORMANCE,
REFOCUSING RESOURCES ON BUSINESS GOALS

The Value of Monitoring Is Knowledge, Reducing Complexity For Better Manageability Across the IT Life Cycle

ORGANIZATIONS DRIVE GLOBAL SOURCING THROUGH COLLABORATION

Too many customers feel under siege because of the state of virus and spam proliferation, government regulation, end-user demands, and unexplained outages. Information Technology (IT) organizations have an unending list of tasks that involve upgrades, patches, false and real alarms, issue resolution, and keeping critical systems running.

Surveys by the leading industry analysts along with the product plans of top platform vendors indicate that business of all sizes have strong motivations to advance IT capabilities, but avoid the complexity and headaches of managing systems, networks, and applications. In addition, increasing risks and vulnerabilities make the routine tasks of IT ever harder to manage and ever more costly.

Informed. The confidence of knowing somebody keeps an eye on IT for you - and that you stay informed - is why monitoring is a practical entry point for many clients to new suites of services, offered under the banner of the Managed Services. Monitoring of hardware, software, and the status of tasks, such as updates, provide visibility at every hour of the day. Applications, network connections, and data are examples of components that are visible to your users, partners, and customers. Information security, capacity, and cost are more often invisible, but affect productivity, reputation, and your organization's ability to innovate.

Definition 6 customers claim many reasons for monitoring applications, servers, and networks. For one, monitoring lets the IT director get reports on the state of the server patching and version updates performed by in-house staff. For another, e-mail and other critical applications were crashing without a known cause. Still another chose monitoring with hosting because it just works. One department fixed the slow response to requests for changes to public-facing Web sites that drive real-time marketing for market share, revenue, and profit. Monitoring is cost-effective and delivers solid data, along with insightful reporting.

Some companies use monitoring to set a baseline of metrics for progress and improvements, achieving better user service levels or consolidating, where appropriate. Monitoring establishes measurements that lead to effective Service Level Agreements (SLA), internally between IT and user departments, or externally between you and outsourcers. Outsourced hosting is cost-effective for Information Worker and collaboration systems, such as portals, that tie together your organization, partners, or customers. Companies that want to lower costs often can achieve cost reductions and redirect funds to new initiatives for corporate growth.

ENABLE CONSOLIDATION, REDEPLOYMENT, & INNOVATION

It may or may not surprise you that many companies feel an imbalance between resources dedicated to existing IT versus the resources available for innovation, growth, and new initiatives. Monitoring helps quantify existing resource allocation: people, servers, network components, software, services, and outsourcing. In addition, monitoring helps companies set performance metrics, assessing issues such as outage, data loss, stability, vulnerability, tasks completion rate, and measures of user and customer satisfaction and retention. This data, along with rigorous methodologies and process, create a comprehensive picture that includes risk factors, such as remote back up, recovery, viruses, hackers, out-of-date versions, and patch management history.

EVER WONDER WHAT HAPPENS ON YOUR NETWORK?

Monitoring does more than maintain vigilance over every local device. It keeps track of any remote office, location, or data center. In essence, tracking every device with an Internet Protocol (IP) address. To get the most from network monitoring, requires dedicated resources, on call 24x7, to provide issue resolution and management oversight. Turnkey, Managed Services offerings have options for skill augmentation, off-shift responsibility, or full-time staffing. A network assessment engages a skill engineer to improve performance or reduce cost.

Applications, on which users depend and the corporation relies for transaction processing, are watched for user experience and transaction success. A wide range of applications can be monitored, such as any version of Microsoft¹s Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint, Exchange, etc. These applications can be Web-based, desktop client applications, or enterprise-wide. Devices monitored include any server, desktop, or mobile device running just about any Operating System (OS), as well as printers, routers, or switches. Organizations are often surprised by rogue devices - unauthorized computing devices - that users plug into the network, such as servers, network storage, wireless access points, etc. The device attributes monitored can include processor utilization, disk space, memory, and power issues from the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) Alerts. Information security monitoring can include firewall, Intrusion Detection System (IDS), or Intrusion Prevention System (IPS). Security assessments do periodic scans of every device for known security vulnerabilities. The data collected from monitoring can lead to better management and investment. Selecting a more comprehensive, Managed Services offering, allows you to rely on more comprehensive protection services for networks, servers, desktops, and mobile devices. These services provide remote network support options.

Monitoring is a good first step towards a comprehensive understanding of systems and network performance because it lets you see what is going on and where change occurs. For new IT managers, this allows them to measure the performance of their equipment and software, and the capabilities of their team. As government regulations further affect IT operations, management must measure networks and systems against Sarbanes-Oxley (SarBox/SOX) compliance, e-mail archive expectations, and avoid loss of sensitive consumer data that requires mandatory disclosure. Monitoring is a first step to understand costs, uptime, availability, bandwidth, and security. This knowledge, provided by monitoring, gives customers intelligence for better decisions.

To automate and lower operational cost, IT needs access to a comprehensive, well-researched array of IT tools, methods, processes, scripts, code, and best practices. The spectrum of capabilities range from monitoring to highly automated IT management. Automated, remote management and monitoring tools:

• Automate multi-server builds and accelerate server deployment
• Centralize account, server, group policy, service, security, and user management
• Proactively monitor both internal data center and customer site operations
• Discover and resolve issues before users are affected
• Automate routine admin tasks such as adding users and provisioning applications
• Centralize and automate the process of performing software and security updates
• Provide rich Web hosting and powerful applications, available as a hosted solution
• Deliver satisfaction & periodic assessments of end-user service levels & perception
• Enable team-oriented Web sites for information sharing and document collaboration
• Provision e-mail services, mobile device support, and collaboration technologies
• Scale for growth or third-party applications and services, such as Web services

MANAGED SERVICES: BOOST IT TO THE NEXT LEVEL

Along with monitoring, clients can add hardware and software, application or operating system, updates or upgrades at uniform, fixed monthly price that includes server hardware & software with automatic software version upgrades. Eventually, you may want complete administration of devices with daily maintenance, such as patching application, applying hot fixes, and updating with service packs. Higher-level services provide patch verification on managed devices and check for correct operation after patching. In total, advanced offerings help customers gain greater efficiency, reliability, security, and responsiveness. Increasing operational efficiency improves IT's ability to manage the future. Other typical benefits are:

• Lower costs by up to 30%
• Gain access to world-class consultants
• Maximize usage or reallocate resources for business growth
• Minimize downtime & legal exposure through IT
• Increase functionality with the capabilities of the latest software
• Stay patched and current in a cost-effective way
• Maintain a secure, reliable environment
• Make IT spending more predictable and better directed

Definition 6 offers IT organizations a clear path to achieving proactive, predictable, and complete care through Managed Services, which begin with a network management audit, supported by monitoring data and best practices. Assessments of existing IT environments lead to tool-based and expert analysis of servers and networks for consolidation, redirection of resources, and focus on the future. The consulting deliverables provide analysis and recommendations that ties directly to goals. The audit considers vulnerability assessment, operational efficiency, skills, and staffing.

Consider how you can move towards systems that are completely up-to-date for reliability and security.

MONITORING ENABLES PROACTIVE IT FOR BUSINESS GOALS

Managed Services begin with monitoring, but have potential to meet IT needs immediately with flawless operation. In essence, Managed Services eliminate sleepless nights, the frustrations of many small problems, the risks of data loss, the vulnerability from viruses and spam, overtime and weekends working, server or network crashes, delay, and lost work. It enables business owners to proactively protect the transactional ability of end users, partners, and customers. This is an easy way to make IT work reliably. To get this piece of mind, Definition 6's customers pay a consistent, flat monthly fee that keeps everything up-to-date and monitored. It is impossible for most companies to do these routine tasks as cost-effectively with in-house staff or contractors.

Managed Services packages offer consistent, monthly software fees that avoid large, one-time charges. These include updates, so you get the latest software you need - and expect. In addition, you no longer have to worry about release dates, waiting for the right moment to buy new software. Move to monthly licensing today and get the enhanced functionality upon release. For example, don't wait for Microsoft's VISTA, go monthly on your software and be able to load VISTA the minute it is released without reordering.

Monitoring benefits are:

• Enable IT to move from reactive, through proactive, to fully managed environment
• Easy to start and risk-free
• Add new services or devices at any time
• Establish Service Level Agreements (SLA)
• Achieve much higher technical staff efficiency
• Improve customer relations through better system performance
• Get clear diagnostics supported by and detailed reporting and site information.
• Receive management reporting on updates, patches, and versions
• Refocus IT resources, based upon good data, to business objectives

MONITORING IS THE FOUNDATION FOR IT LIFE-CYCLE MANAGEMENT

Software, hardware, consulting, and bandwidth providers all have initiatives to build pieces for an optimal, Managed Services environment that offers customers highly functional, usable Information Technology (IT) with the ease of plugging into an electrical outlet, as though IT were a utility. Monitoring is a first piece of the solution, with each vendor supplying separate software tools to understand your IT system. However, only a unified view allows the high-level understanding to best select, modify, operate, and retire the various IT components throughout their life cycle. Historical and real-time performance data enable optimal use of IT resources throughout the life-cycle of design, reconfiguration, deployment, and retirement. Network monitoring services provide a data source to infrastructure consulting, which leverages thorough knowledge to create optimal solutions.