Event Recap
RECAP | ROUNDTABLE | New Approaches to IT Management
2 Oct 2018
The growing trend towards aligning facilities management and IT together in one reporting chain focused on IT applications delivery has had major positive results for a growing number of companies, according to Todd Traver, Uptime Institute VP of Optimization and Strategy, and participants in an Uptime Institute virtual roundtable held on September 27th.
Todd, who is leading Uptime Institute’s Hybrid Resiliency efforts, started the meeting by outlining the positive outcomes possible when facilities and IT organization planning and strategic initiatives are aligned. These include less internal organizational friction and better alignment of financial measurements and IT-focused goals, which enable more efficient use of resources and comprehensive oversight of all the critical areas required to provide resiliency and reliability.
The roundtable participants, comprising facilities operations management, expressed agreement, with several noting that the facilities and IT do not always work in harmony, so some inefficiencies remained.
These inefficiencies, according to one participant, could never be fully eliminated. Some inefficiency might be inherent in the planning process, he noted, because of the need to balance risk and strategy.
Today, the group agreed, IT is largely “steering the boat,” which without proper planning puts facilities in a largely reactive posture, but also now engages more frequently and deeply with their facilities counterparts and seeks their input more readily, which leads to better decision making.
The group talked about migration to a hybrid infrastructure at length, with one participant noting that he had seen outages in workloads that had been transferred to platform as a service (PaaS). For this reason, his organization was reluctant to test or move mission-critical workloads outside the enterprise and that a balanced and informed approach to risk management needs to be developed.
That said, the group generally agreed that IT decision making had improved their companies’ abilities to take advantage of new architectures, with one siting the ability to use PaaS when “bursting into the cloud” to obtain capacity for seasonal or other peak loads.
Todd wound up the session as he described the future, in which application resilience will guide IT decision making, that for most organizations will lead them to a hybrid implementation across multiple sites and platforms, which when properly implemented will, allow for greater application flexibility, improved overall IT cost efficiency, increased IT and facilities utilization, and position them for improved agility and resiliency through the use of emerging platforms, such as containers or Kubernetes.
Todd, who is leading Uptime Institute’s Hybrid Resiliency efforts, started the meeting by outlining the positive outcomes possible when facilities and IT organization planning and strategic initiatives are aligned. These include less internal organizational friction and better alignment of financial measurements and IT-focused goals, which enable more efficient use of resources and comprehensive oversight of all the critical areas required to provide resiliency and reliability.
The roundtable participants, comprising facilities operations management, expressed agreement, with several noting that the facilities and IT do not always work in harmony, so some inefficiencies remained.
These inefficiencies, according to one participant, could never be fully eliminated. Some inefficiency might be inherent in the planning process, he noted, because of the need to balance risk and strategy.
Today, the group agreed, IT is largely “steering the boat,” which without proper planning puts facilities in a largely reactive posture, but also now engages more frequently and deeply with their facilities counterparts and seeks their input more readily, which leads to better decision making.
The group talked about migration to a hybrid infrastructure at length, with one participant noting that he had seen outages in workloads that had been transferred to platform as a service (PaaS). For this reason, his organization was reluctant to test or move mission-critical workloads outside the enterprise and that a balanced and informed approach to risk management needs to be developed.
That said, the group generally agreed that IT decision making had improved their companies’ abilities to take advantage of new architectures, with one siting the ability to use PaaS when “bursting into the cloud” to obtain capacity for seasonal or other peak loads.
Todd wound up the session as he described the future, in which application resilience will guide IT decision making, that for most organizations will lead them to a hybrid implementation across multiple sites and platforms, which when properly implemented will, allow for greater application flexibility, improved overall IT cost efficiency, increased IT and facilities utilization, and position them for improved agility and resiliency through the use of emerging platforms, such as containers or Kubernetes.
Request an evaluation to view this report
Apply for a four-week evaluation of Uptime Intelligence; the leading source of research, insight and data-driven analysis focused on digital infrastructure.
Already have access? Log in here
Posting comments is not available for Network Guests