January 2016

Because of this complexity, flaws are evident.

“One vendor may offer a strong configuration management solution but be weak in analytics,” said Mary Johnston Turner, research vice president, enterprise systems management software at IDC, a research firm based in Framingham, Mass.

The API Conundrum

Application programming interfaces (APIs) play a key role in linking hybrid cloud management tools to provide a single pane of glass across different cloud environments. To help IT pros gain visibility into hybrid cloud software and hardware, vendors need to provide interfaces into and out of their products. In addition, connections are needed to transfer information among different modules — for example, from a configuration management system to an analytics application.

However, APIs are designed in different ways. Software-based APIs are easy to deploy, but add processing cycles and degrade system performance. Other APIs come as appliances — a combination of hardware and software dropped into the network — but these APIs become one more piece of hardware that an IT pro needs to manage, leading to increased complexity.

In addition, API integration is dynamic, and enterprises constantly upgrade their systems. With updates occurring so frequently, gaps emerge between what a cloud provider runs and what the customers’ hybrid cloud systems can support, forcing admins to bounce from one management interface to another.

Making the right connection

When building a hybrid cloud, the connections between public and private clouds can be difficult to consolidate. Businesses must weave two distinct data centers with different technologies into a cohesive whole.

Vendors focus first on connecting their own services, so when businesses use underlying infrastructure from one supplier — such as Microsoft Windows Server running on Microsoft Azure — they gain more management integration, which means less movement from screen to screen. When the infrastructure comes from multiple vendors, connectivity is spottier, and visibility becomes murkier, said Colm Keegan, senior analyst at The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), an analyst firm based in Milford, Mass.

Cloud vendors know many customers want to mix and match their services, and have been prodded to improve integration. Amazon Web Services and Google have been working to enhance their management services, while Microsoft offers a robust set of hybrid cloud management tools and consistent interfaces for private and public clouds — but there is still work to be done, according to ESG’s Keegan. For instance, Microsoft’s tools are still largely proprietary.

The value of tradition

When it comes to achieving a single pane of glass for hybrid cloud management, enterprises can also look to third-party vendors for help. Traditional management vendors, such as BMC Software, CA Technologies, Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and IBM, are strong on the private cloud side of the equation, but weaker on monitoring public cloud.

Newer vendors, such as Cloud Cruiser, Egenera, Kaavo, RightScale and Verismic Software, have entered the management marketplace. They tend to do a good job with public cloud services, but are less adept at delivering private cloud management tools. And while their systems are based on modern designs, and are easier to alter and maintain, they have limited feature sets.

Cloud computing is becoming one of the most common computing models in the enterprise. As companies adopt hybrid cloud, their focus shifts to hybrid cloud management tools. And while these tools are improving, most tend to have holes, forcing admins to bounce between interfaces. As the hybrid cloud management market matures, organizations should explore their options and choose the tool that best fits their needs.

Read the article by Paul Korzeniowski at searchcloudcomputing.com.

While there is a wealth IT innovations these days, two in particular are starting to capture the imagination of managed service providers (MSPs) looking to introduce higher levels of automation into their operations. The first is the growing need for big data analytics services capable of capturing massive amounts of machine data that can be used to diagnose potential problems long before they occur. Arguably, the second profound technical advance is machine learning algorithms that promise to automate IT operations at levels of unprecedented scale.

Among the managed service providers leading the charge in applying advanced technologies in a way that will transform MSP economics is Infosys. Most managed service provider engagements will now be delivered around fixed-pricing models, and as a result, MSPs will need to automate more processes than ever before to maintain profitability, said Samson David, senior vice president and head of cloud infrastructure for Infosys. A big part of that focus is going to be on reducing the number of IT professionals required to deliver any given service because the biggest financial issue facing MSPs is the cost of IT labor.

To accomplish that, Infosys has been making massive investments in software to automate as many processes as possible, David said. “It’s an arms race. We need to take thousands of people out of the process,” he said.

For that reason, many of the services MSPs deliver, such as cyber-security, will increasingly need to be pushed into the cloud. Once there, it will become simpler over time to centrally apply big data analytics services to optimize data-intensive processes, such as security, said Matthew Tirman, president of Redhawk Network Security, an MSP based in Bend, Ore.

“Customers want us to reduce the stress and overhead of IT security,” Tirman said. “We need to find ways to be more cost-efficient.”

For that reason, many MSPs are shifting to tools hosted in the cloud that don’t require agent software to be placed on every endpoint to provide management capabilities. That approach makes it simpler for MSPs to scale their services because they don’t need to put software on a local server to collect data, said Robert Brown, director of service for Verismic, a specialist in cloud management and security.

“We give MSPs the option to deploy agents,” Brown said. “But what we really enable is an approach where everything can be pulled back into the cloud.”

The good news from an MSP perspective is that IT monitoring tools are starting to incorporate machine learning algorithms to identify and help resolve potential issues before they become a problem. Case in point is Rocana, a provider of IT monitoring tools that is incorporating machine learning algorithms to more accurately identify anomalies that are indicative of potential application performance issues. The end goal is to leverage all the machine data generated in an IT environment in a way that results in machine learning algorithms helping prevent IT issues from happening in the first place, said Rocana CEO Omer Trajman.

“We’re capturing domain-specific analytics all across IT,” Trajman said. “We can see everything right down to the individual log line.”

For MSPs, the goal going forward is no longer how quickly they can fix an IT issue, but rather what can be done to prevent it from occurring in the first place. Given the current level of IT complexity most organizations face today, there is an assumption that something will go wrong with IT sooner or later. It’s the role of the MSP to mitigate the impact of that complexity on the business.

However, as customers begin to understand what can be accomplished using machine learning algorithms, it’s already becoming clear that the level of expectations about what MSPs will need to be able to deliver in terms of managing IT services is about to increase by several orders of magnitude.

Read the article at channelinsider.com.

– Michael Vizard has been covering IT issues in the enterprise for more than 25 years as an editor and columnist for publications such as InfoWorld, eWEEK, Baseline, CRN, ComputerWorld and Digital Review.

Verismic, a global leader in cloud IT management technology and green solutions, today announced the launch of a sleek, more focused user interface for its award-winning Syxsense  and two new features: multisite vRep and patch grouping. Hailed by MSPmentor.net as “the first and only endpoint device management software that requires no software agent on end-user devices” and defined by Network Computing Magazine as “a refreshing new approach to endpoint management which does away with the excess baggage associated with traditional solutions,” the award-winning all-in-one cloud-based software simplifies endpoint management, reduces costs and boosts productivity.

“The new UI and these latest updates allow our clients even more immediate access to all the functionality they use every day,” says Verismic president and CEO, Ashley Leonard. “Our team is meeting our clients’ needs by seamlessly updating their environment to be more interactive and intuitive so they can confidently and conveniently manage their IT needs today and into the future.”

Verismic’s cloud-based IT management software is an easy-to-install and easy-to-use solution that can meet the needs of one-person IT shops, larger IT teams and managed service providers (MSPs) alike. It is accessible from any supported web browser with no software to install.

• Multisite vRep, which allows clients to complete tasks like patch updates or deploy software to sites that cannot see each other due to isolated subnets or conflicting IP address ranges. Clients have control over which virtual representative handles each environment from a single dashboard.
• Patch Grouping, which was developed to increase clients’ efficiency. It allows clients to bring together a large list of patches into one group and treat them as a single unit that clients can reuse whenever necessary.

The new updates to CMS have further positioned it for more industry recognition in 2016. CMS has already been recognized with many honors since its launch in 2014, including a 2015 Cloud Computing Excellence Award by TMCnet’s Cloud Computing Magazine, Gold Winner for Most Innovative IT Software in the 10th Annual IT World Awards by Network Products Guide, the Top Innovator at the prestigious Association for Corporate Growth Awards and the Most Innovative Product at the Best in Biz 2014 awards. See a full list of awards here

The largest hotel company in the world owns no physical rooms. The largest passenger service in the world does not own a single car. Unlike the technology that has created a plethora of products and functions for consumers and businesses, Airbnb and Uber are bringing technological disruption to delivery models. And in 2016, the information technology sphere will continue to accelerate a trend developed over the last several years. The IT offerings that businesses purchase will not change, however; how those products and services are purchased will be considerably different.

The consumption of IT services is moving away from the traditional mechanism of long-implementation cycles including: design, purchase and installation of operating systems, systems management software, server costs, and maintenance. This approach embeds technologies in a slow, complex and expensive manner. Replacing it is a skillful and agile system for IT that provides services, storage and infrastructure on demand.

This delivery system offers scalability, allowing IT divisions to purchase based on need. This is a fundamental shift that places corporate IT departments as consumers of IT, thereby allowing greater synergies inside organizations and placing the IT department as a deliverer of value to the business as opposed to a cost center. Now, IT’s role is not just service delivery, but a means to add value by managing risk more effectively, and bringing faster speed to market for products and services.

Fundamental to this transformation is the utilization of cloud-based technologies as the delivery solution for IT services, storage and infrastructure. Services such as Microsoft Azure, Dropbox (News – Alert) and Verismic’s Syxsense are the next phase of an evolving IT infrastructure focused on virtualization and automation.

There is tremendous growth in these cloud platforms, with compound annual growth rates exceeding 15 percent. And rates are expected to continue climbing in the coming decade as demand increases for innovative solutions to the surge and complexity of data driven applications, resource utilization, and management and monitoring environments.

IT is aligning with the long-run economic concept of specialization of labor and its development and enhancement of core competencies, as a means to exert a comparative and competitive advantage in the marketplace.

For the IT department looking to integrate further into a corporate ecosystem, this means focusing on areas of expertise. If your IT department is adept at infrastructure, then pursue that business and shed unprofitable lines that can be outsourced. The goal should be to hold a core of differentiated assets, which can drive high-value competitive inertia and greater cost efficiency.

This task can be difficult, particularly if there are antiquated and rigid IT processes embedded in an organization, or a lack of IT maturity. To mitigate these challenges, the push for IT departments should be to create greater integration by compressing IT silos together, accelerate virtualization and automation, and expand IT self-service options.

Read the full article at tmcnet.com.