The main function of IT operations is to keep IT services running smoothly and efficiently. It would be nirvana if IT infrastructure services just work perfectly throughout their lifespan after they are initially installed and configured. However, the reality is that hardware fails, bugs are found, features need to be added, security flaws are found, patches need to be applied, usage fluctuates, data needs to be protected, upgrades need to be done, demand increases, etc. The following are the important job of IT operations:

Monitoring

Monitoring is the only way to keep track of the health and availability of the systems. Monitoring can be accomplished by looking at the system’s health via dashboard or console, or via specialized monitoring appliances. One major component of monitoring is alerting via email or pagers when there is a major issue. Monitoring can also come from incident tickets generated by machines or end users that may not be apparent via machine monitoring. System logs can also be used for trending and monitoring as it can bring into light some flaws on the system.

Troubleshooting

Once issues are detected, IT operations should be able to troubleshoot these issues and fix them as soon as possible to bring the service back online. Issues that are more complicated to fix should be escalated to vendors, higher level support, or engineers and developers.

Change Control

IT operations should not make any changes (such as configuration change, hardware replacement, upgrades, etc) without following the proper change control procedure. More than 50% of outages are caused by changes on the system. IT services are often tightly integrated with other system and a change on one system may be able to affect the others. Subject matter experts of the various systems should make sure that a change will not affect their system. Planning and testing are vital steps in performing changes.

Capacity planning

IT operations should monitor and trend the utilization of resources (compute, storage, network) and allocate resources to ensure that there is enough capacity to serve demand. They should be able to predict and allocate resources so that there is capacity when they are needed.

Performance optimization

IT operations should optimize IT services and ensure efficient use of resources. The goal is provide an excellent user experience for these services. Mechanisms such as redundancy, local load balancing, global load balancing and caching improves utilization, efficiency and end user experience.

Backups

In addition to keeping the IT services running smoothly, IT operations should also protect these systems and their data by backing them up and replicating them to a remote site. The goal is to bring these systems back online in as little time as possible when there is a catastrophic failure on the systems.

Security

IT operations should also be responsible for securing the systems. Due to its enormous task, a lot of companies employ a dedicated Security Operations Center (SOC) that watches security breaches.

Automation

One of the goals of IT operations is to automate most manual activities via scripting and self-healing mechanism. This enables them to focus on higher value tasks and not get bogged down on repetitive tasks.

One of the most important jobs of IT Consultants/Architects is to translate business problems into technology solutions. Many companies today and in the future will need to solve business problems to remain competitive. Exponential advances in information technology will enable businesses to solve problems.

But translating business problems into technology solutions is often hard. Most of the time there is a disconnect between business people and technology people. For example, business people speak of vision, strategy, processes, and functional requirements, whereas technology folks speak about programming, infrastructure, big data and technical requirements. In addition, people who understand the business typically are not smart about technology, and vice versa – technology folks often do not understand business challenges. Both have totally different perspectives – business folks are concerned about business opportunities, business climate, and business objectives, while technology folks are concerned about technology challenges, technical resources, and technical skills.

To be successful, IT Consultants/Architects should bridge the gap and provide businesses the services and the solution they need. IT Consultants/Architects need to translate business objectives into actions. In order to do this, they should be able to identify business problems, determine the requirements to solve problems, determine the technology available to help solve them, and architect the best solution. In addition, they should be able to identify strategic partners that will help move the project and determine likely barriers.

Most importantly though, IT Consultants/Architects should be able to manage expectations. It’s always better to under promise and over deliver.

Nowadays, when business units require computing resources for their new software application, they have a choice between using an external provider or using the company’s internal IT department. Gone are the days when they solely rely on the IT department to provide them with compute and storage resources. Business units are now empowered because of the growing reliability and ubiquity of external cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Services provided by external providers are generally easy to use and fast to provision. As long as you have a credit card, a Windows or Linux server can be running within a few hours, if not minutes. Compare that to internal IT departments which usually take days, if not weeks, to spin-up one. Large companies especially have to follow a bureaucratic procedure that takes weeks to complete.

Because of this, business units who are under the pressure to provide the application or service to the end users end up using external providers. This is the fast growing “shadow IT.” More often than not, IT departments do not know about this, until they are called to troubleshoot issues, such as to fix a slow network connection or to restore data after a security breach or data loss.

Using external providers can be good for the company. They have their merits such as fast provisioning and ability to quickly scale up, but they also have their limitations. Security, vendor lock-in, integration with on-premise applications and databases are some of the concerns. Some of these business units do not know the implication on the company’s network which may impact users during normal business hours. Some of them do not consider backup and disaster recovery. For regulated companies, compliance and data protection are important. They should be able to tell the auditors where the data resides and replicates. Also, as you scale up the use of compute and storage, it gets more costly.

External cloud providers are here to stay and their innovation and services will get better and better. The future as I foresee it will be a hybrid model – a combination of external providers and internal IT providers. The key for companies is to provide guidelines and policies on when to use external provider vs internal IT. For instance, a proof of concept application may be well suited to an external cloud because it is fast to provision. An application that is used only by a few users and does not need any integration with existing application is another one. Applications that integrates with the company’s internal SAP system, on the other hand, is well suited for internal cloud. These policies must be well communicated to business units.

For IT departments, they must be able to provide a good level of service to the business, streamline the process of provisioning, adapt technologies that are able to respond to the business quickly, and provide an internal cloud services that matches the services offered by external providers. This way, business units will be forced to use internal IT instead of external providers.

One of the pain points for companies these days is how difficult it is to find relevant information inside their corporate network. I often hear people complain that it is easier to find any information on the Internet using Google or Bing rather than inside the enterprise.

Well, Google has been selling their Google Search Appliance (GSA) for many years. GSA brings Google superior search technology to a business corporate network. It even has the familiar look and feel that people have been accustomed to when doing a search on the Internet.

GSA can index and serve content located on the internal websites, documents located on file servers, and Microsoft Sharepoint repositories.

I recently replaced an old GSA, and quickly remembered how easy and fast it is to deploy. The hardware of the GSA is a souped up Dell server with a bright yellow casing. Racking the hardware is a snap. It comes with instructions on where to plug the network interfaces. The initial setup is done via a back-to-back network connection to a laptop, where network settings such as the IP address, netmask, gateway, time server, mail server, etc are configured.

Once the GSA is accessible on the network, the only other thing to do is to configure the initial crawl of the web servers and/or file systems, which may take a couple of hours. Once the documents are indexed, the appliance is ready to answer user search requests.

The search appliance has many advanced features and can be customized to your needs. For instance, you can customize the behavior and appearance of the search page. You can turn on or off the auto-completion feature. You can configure security settings, so that content is only available to certain people that are properly authenticated, and many other features.

Internal search engines such as the Google Search Appliance will increase the productivity of corporate employees by helping them save time looking for information.