The chasm of invisibility that sits at the heart of IT

[ChrisPope]

There's a problem in information technology. Not everybody appears to know what is going on, which systems are in place, how much money is being spent where… or know what pieces of hardware and software are supposed to connect to which mission critical functions. Essentially, this issue breaks down to being one of a crucial lack of visibility.

The issue is compounded by the fact that some users and stakeholders don't even know where the mission critical functions are. It's the blind leading the systems visibility blind.

A C-Suite Reality

The really bad news is that the people who should hold the knowledge and clarity of vision — the C-suite execs in the form of the CEO, CTO and CIO and the 'newer breed' of Chief Data Officers (CDO) — are the ones who remain in the dark. To put it in plain terms, most C-suite executives have very little understanding of the number of servers in their business, let alone where those servers are, what applications they support and who has access to them.

Does it matter? Absolutely it does.

The C-suite has a responsibility to bridge this knowledge gap. The IT function needs the visibility to be able to keep everything up and running and, at the same time, the agility to be able to bring about dynamic change on a year-on-year basis. To put the issue into further context, there is a distinct lack of understanding within businesses today over what aspects of IT support what business services. This causes headaches from a regulatory perspective, data protection and cost profile. For years IT departments have just been seen as a cost centre by the CFO, but in today's much more tech-savvy world, IT should be viewed as a business partner and profit centre. The lack of visibility into their own realm has, when exposed through an audit or systems outage, the potential to hurt the reputation of the CIO at this critical time when they are moving up the C-Suite.

Siloed stream of data

Something of a vicious circle is developing here, as multiple disconnected monitoring tools make this situation even worse. Each tool generates its own siloed stream of data -- and multiple tools often report the same issue. The complexity of today's IT systems has led to a situation where IT struggles to use effective monitoring tools to provide a cost profile back to service owners. This leads to costs 'being blended' and well-funded services and projects picking up the bill for less performant aspects of the business. We end up in a situation where Network Operations Center (NOC) staff are having to manually correlate information to understand what is actually happening by connecting and eliminating redundant data.

Part of the answer here can come from developing a Configuration Management DataBase (CMDB), which acts as a data warehouse for IT assets and related business services. But it's not that simple, because most companies don't have a centralised CMDB. Instead, in the hunt for visibility, they track and make manual adjustments to one or more spreadsheets that act as a kind of 'local CMDB' system (often using tools like Microsoft Visio) which end up being inaccurate and very time-consuming to maintain.

An inability to understand what components make up a service in this way causes major issues when an outage occurs. We find that IT is not able to easily determine which services and users are affected, what the root cause of the issue is and what the cost of the business impact is.

No point in point-in-time

We know that manually creating a service map using a software tool such as Microsoft Visio is also prone to error because it tracks and logs the single point-in-time when each data record is made. This means that when firms adopt a modern approach to Agile software methodologies and Continuous Delivery for dynamic online service delivery, an immediate level of inaccuracy is introduced. When we look at how today's deployments play out with people manually logging onto applications, servers, network devices etc. to build out these service maps, there is an immediate visibility problem. Due to the pressure for business change and the dynamic nature of today's IT environments, these maps are out of date almost as soon as they are complete and the exercise has to begin again. The scary heart of invisibility that sits at the heart of IT starts to become clear i.e. huge levels of blindness pervade and proliferate.

So is there a way out of here? Well yes. While infrastructure discovery tools have been around for a while, what is newer (and potentially much more impactful) are service mapping technologies.

Service mapping, top down discovery

Service mapping will interrogate an entire enterprise computing system piece by piece to perform a top down discovery process and find out which piece of infrastructure supports specific services - and so automate the process of connection. By developing a service visibility strategy that includes automated infrastructure discovery and service mapping, firms can create a functional window into all business-critical services that is always up to date. So if we have justified the need for service mapping at a surface level, what are the real benefits just one tier deeper down?

Firms need to map services for a number of reasons, such as compliance, which is very much the case in banks and insurance companies. Another key driver is the need to know what piece of IT infrastructure does what or, in more technical terms, which piece of IT infrastructure supports which applications and which data -- and how mission critical that data is. If a piece of infrastructure is comparatively less business critical in that it (for example) just supports 'file and print' functions, then it can be classified as such and treated differently to more mission critical areas in terms of storage, security, policy access and so on.

How did we get into this mess?

Companies often find themselves in this disconnected silo-based 'mess' of a situation as a result of acquisitions, mergers and new project-based IT extensions for example. This happens in all verticals and the C-suite ends up with no idea which piece of technology goes where. Firms end up with 'ghost servers' that are under-utilised or in many cases not utilised at all. Ultimately this situation represents a massive threat to the C-suite and in particular the CIO and CTO. As much as the IT department is the digital hub of any business, in many cases we find that the IT department ends up being the most cost-inefficient and production-ineffective department of all.

The heart of IT is often a chasm of invisibility, but the tools exist to map our way out of this quagmire. The new service-based world of IT delivery will only exacerbate the sensitivity here for firms who chose to ignore the reality.

Get a service map and turn on the light to illuminate service visibility, or you'll hit a dark wall faster than you think.