Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 32 | Page 46

FEATURE: SYSTEMS INTEGRATION support and training from distribution and vendor partners. What are the advantages of improved IT integration? Consider cybersecurity; many vendors today tout their solution portfolios as comprehensive security platforms. The complexity of modern cybersecurity, however, means that it is only through the //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// spending preference from CapEx to more manageable OpEx. This has meant that SIs who diversified their business to focus on service delivery and value add differentiation are today primed for success. Delivering effective integration in a hybrid environment Perhaps the key to ensuring effective IT integration is efficient monitoring. Ideally THIS SINGLE-CONSOLE APPROACH… REDUCES THE TIME TAKEN TO BOTH IDENTIFY AND TROUBLESHOOT THE ROOT CAUSE OF AN ISSUE. Hybrid IT adoption and its challenges More businesses are moving their legacy applications, and the parts of their IT infrastructure that are not business-critical or data-sensitive, to the cloud for its flexibility and reduced application hosting costs. Although Gartner estimates the worldwide public cloud revenue to grow 21.4% in 2018, many companies are still keeping their business-critical services on-premises to more readily comply with data security regulations. Adopting a hybrid IT environment forces businesses to deal with complex management demands, such as adding to the toolset they already use to manage their on-premises infrastructure. Additionally, these tools often lead to data silos, increasing the time it takes to troubleshoot and find the root cause of an issue. Addressing the challenges of hybrid environment expert integration of best-in-class point products and the implementation of security policies that enterprises can harden their security posture. Improved integration makes interplay between these disparate components possible, delivering a true ‘holistic security ecosystem’ to end-customers. Is the process of integration more difficult to achieve than in the past? From a business perspective, for at least a couple of years now, it has become increasingly evident to systems integrators (SIs) that competing on price is no longer feasible. This not only slashes profit margins but ends up being detrimental to the end- customer as SIs are unable to, or simply not motivated enough, to provide the highest quality of work. In reaction to this change, the SIs have had to invest in skills development. With the right skills available, they can offer new services and an elevated level of value addition which helps create new revenue streams. SIs have also had to adapt their business models to remain relevant in the era of the cloud and the change in customer 46 INTELLIGENTCIO enterprises require the ability to monitor the performance of their entire IT operation. However, the increasing adoption of hybrid IT environments has resulted in end-to- end system monitoring being increasingly difficult to achieve. However, ManageEngine, the real- time IT management company, has announced that it is providing end-to- end IT operations management for hybrid environments by adding storage monitoring capabilities to OpManager, its unified IT monitoring software. When combined with the company’s application performance software, OpManager and Applications Manager offers end-to-end visibility that allows network administrators to monitor the performance of their entire IT operations, including network, storage, application and cloud environments, all from a single console. The company has also added maps of performance data from both OpManager and Applications Manager to provide a complete, unified picture of an enterprise’s entire IT infrastructure. Both new features help in addressing the challenges faced during the transition to a hybrid IT environment. The integration between ManageEngine’s OpManager and Applications Manager bridges the gap between on-premises and cloud infrastructure, combining to create a solution that can monitor networks, servers, storage, and on-premises and cloud applications. This solution allows network administrators to monitor over 1,000 device vendors, more than 100 applications, and both on-premises and cloud IT environments, from a single console. This single-console approach helps reduce the complexity of monitoring siloed data and allows IT teams to visualise the performance of their hybrid IT environment so they can act immediately when an issue arises. It also reduces the time taken to both identify and troubleshoot the root cause of an issue. “Application performance can degrade due to underlying network issues or the application server itself. Our end-to- end monitoring lets you detect outages anywhere in your interdependent IT network, both on-premises and in the cloud,” said Mathivanan Venkatachalam, Vice President at ManageEngine. “By providing a proper visualisation of network infrastructure and connected applications, we help you www.intelligentcio.com