Federal Enterprise Infrastructure Management (EIM)  DRAFT

Enterprise Infrastructure Management (Strategic vs. Tactical?)

Organizations, both federal and commercial, have built out their IT infrastructures with various tool sets from various vendors. There was a good reason for this; that is how IT innovation and the vendor industry grew up.  The solution to uncoordinated IT Infrastructure was, and still is, the system interface.  Interfaces, although supporting independent IT solutions are costly to produce and more costly to maintain since vendors independently upgrade/enhance their products without knowledge of customers interface requirements.   

Yet budget challenges and the drive for continued performance enhancements have recently led IT leadership to step back and view the infrastructure in a more proactive strategic role vs. reactive with tactical point solutions. BMC solutions are well positioned to help agencies deliver strategic EIM for the following reasons:

1^st. BMC remains diligently focused on leading the way for IT organizations to respond to deploying EIM in a proactive strategic role. This is accomplished in two ways. BMC offers integrated EIM solution sets. Therefore the solutions work in coordination, share common IT repository information and in an automatic fashion to proactively respond to various IT firestorms. What’s more, maintenance releases are more easily coordinated.

       2^nd. BMC’s solutions offer a comprehensive approach to linking IT resources  with mission and business objectives. 

Consider the following scenario: 

An agency’s core mission application runs on a certain server. A performance monitor picks up an alert that the server in getting close to capacity. A trouble ticket is opened up. From the server farm, another server is selected to be added to this application’s domain. The proper change is managed, the server asset is properly configured, access is granted, and the performance of the application barely even blinks. Lastly, the trouble ticket is closed out. Normally, many different individuals would have to be involved and manually administer such a reaction. Yet, in this scenario, no human intervention took place. Time, money, human capital and downtime were saved! This scenario represents a view of what is now referred to in the IT industry as Business Service Management (BSM). BMC is credited as both the creator and the leader of BSM.  

BMC’s integrated EIM offering offers us the lead for BSM. It is the integration of the various solution sets that allow for quick and automated coordination. Center to the integrated solution is what the IT industry has coined the Configurations Management Data Base (CMDB). Here in the CMDB all important EIM information is captured and stored once, to be used by all integrated solutions. One place to capture, one place to maintain and one place in authority.  

BMC’s integrated solutions follow the industry adopted best practice ITIL framework. ITIL is an integrated set of guidelines and common terminology for Service Management best practices. ITIL’s outcome is to deliver IT business alignment and drive incremental service delivery improvement.

The chart below represents a simplified view of BMC’s integrated EIM.

Routes to Value (RTV)

Routes to Value

Service Level Management (SLM)

Provides real-time service level management and leverages existing IT management tools and service desk processes to deliver business- aware information about real-time state of services

Sample Need:

·        Are SLA’s established? How are they defined? Are they met?

·        Are SLA’s needed for support services and IT component and user response?

·        Can compliance be measured?

    Sample Functionality:

·        Understand relationships of components and how they support the user

·        Optimize performance

·        Trigger workflow for non- compliance states such as escalation

Incident & Problem Management (IPM)

Provides a link between service desk and event management, thereby aligning service support with business interruptions to reduce disruptions

      Sample Need:

·        Does the current help desk provide the ability to submit, monitor, associate and manage incidents, problems, change tasks and asset inventories?

·        Can users self –serve and self-solve issues?

     Sample Functionality:

·        Classification to help determine priority, assignment and impact of requests

·        Automatic links with incident and problem related service level information to track performance.

Infrastructure & Application Management (IAM)

Manage and control all enterprise applications and underlying IT infrastructure components

       Sample Need:

·        Is there the required access and visibility into the status and performance of individual components?

·        Are there difficulties in pinpointing where a problem originated?

       Sample Functionality:

·        Common toolset across mainframe, distributed and desktop environments to control infrastructure.

·        Support of heterogeneous applications and environments (SAP, WebSphere, PeopleSoft)

Service Impact & Event Management (SIEM)

Provides real-time consolidated information on the overall health picture of virtually the entire IT enterprise

      Sample Need:

·        When a problem occurs, can you automatically assign to the right person?

·        Do you know your service degradation before users start to cal?

·        How are problems prioritized?

     Sample Functionality:

·        Solution can span all types of IT events, from mainframe to distributed systems, from applications to middleware and networks.

·        Automated recovery abilities.

Asset Management and Discovery (AMD)

Provides a comprehensive, flexible solution for identifying IT assets and automating lifecycle, contractual and financial control

      Sample Need:

·        Do you have an accurate asset data repository?

·        Are there controls to ensure users are deploying approved configurations?

      Sample Functionality:

·        Automated lifecycle , contractual and financial controls.

·        Documentation of IT inventory and control processes.

Change and Configuration Management (CCM)

Control and automation of the entire change lifecycle for rapid and reliable configuration knowledge

     Sample Need:

·        How do you ensure changes are appropriate and follow approval mandates?

·        Is there an ability to maintain and enforce standard configurations, while detecting and resolving non-standard configurations?

     Sample Functionality:

·        Automatic discovery and maintenance of physical, configuration and relationship data about IT assets stored in a common Configuration Management Database (CMDB)

·        Integration to Service Desk to link configuration information and related change history to each incident or problem ticket

Capacity Management & Provisioning (CMP)

Provides measured usage reporting to enabling capacity planning evolving to prediction and automated provisioning

     Sample Need:

·        At what utilization are your servers running?

·        Do you have difficulty determining the right size and configuration of servers?

·        Are you interested in reducing IT infrastructure cost by 40% or more?

     Sample Functionality:

·        Implementing processes and tools to measure and maintain system usage.

·        Understanding the baseline required to deliver appropriate service.

Identity Management (IdM)

Centrally manages identities & access privileges to all mainframe & distributed systems

      Sample Need:

·        Is there tight control and visibility into who has access to what, who is trying to access what, and who authorizes the access?

·        Does it take too long to set up new users that should have certain accesses?

      Sample Functionality:

·        Central, policy based management for enterprise identities and corresponding access privileges.

·        Physical, logical and organizational view of an agency’s entire user population.