Managing IT for New-age Business

Soma Tah

The advent of digital era is not only changing the way businesses are run, but also changing the enterprise work space in a significant way. Employees no longer depend on the IT department or its permission to manage their business or technology needs. While this kind of covert activities are already keeping IT on its toes, digital is also changing the way businesses interact with their customers. And as businesses are seeing clear financial benefits of embracing the application economy, IT feels more pressure to align itself with the business

Raj Sabhlok - President, ManageEngine

needs.

Raj Sabhlok, President of ManageEngine explains how this rapid pace of technology adoption across organizations are keeping the IT managers up at night and speaks to Soma Tah on few easy and readily available tools and solutions that can bring some amount respite to them.

Being in IT or in an IT administrator's position is not easy to deal with. They are perhaps the most overworked and under-appreciated lot of employees in any organization, which is quite apparent from people in IT changing the jobs often. So what makes it a tough place to sustain?

Technology is critical for businesses today. Many of their business strategies are underpinned by technology only. Yet, they are hesitant to put a lot of money into IT as IT has always been a person- driven organization and that puts cost pressure anyway on the businesses. IT, therefore, has remained relatively of the same size over the years, while other lines of business have grown rapidly in size. Although it is not growing as fast as the other units, but the expectation from IT is not growing less in any extent.

For example, if any department in the organization needs any specific tools for business or operation- the implementation is done by the IT departments mostly. But the fast growing technology needs are putting IT through the grind. They have their hands full already and people ask for more.

IT, thus, runs the risk of being irrelevant if they cannot keep up with the demand -making the IT managers responsive to changes more than ever. On one hand, they manage the old infra, and assure new technology deployment and get them managed on the other hand.

This demanding environment asks for a lot of agility and automation in the IT management environment. IT managers need solutions that uses automation, reduce the amount of work that they have to do, make things easier by bringing a lot of intelligence into the software, rather than depending on manual intelligence.

Here are some of the IT management challenges that new-age businesses often face, while they scale up, but can be taken care of with some readily available solutions in the market.

Help Desk

If we look at the service desk evolution over a period of time, it used to be a simple service or help desk until ten years ago. Help desk used to serve internal employees mostly and organizations didn't even require any software to manage that. But as the sizes of the organizations grew, the productive way to do it was to deploy service desk software. Today, anything you need in terms of service request, managing facilities, looking at contracts, the service desk plays a central role. Once all your service requests are logged into the service desk, you can easily take decisions on the workflow management and the SLA parts of it.

Mobile Device Management

More and more organizations are deploying mobile solutions these days- allowing the customers and even the employees to use mobile devices to be more productive at work. In many cases, those devices are employee-owned devices and some cases they are corporate-owned devices- which makes the enterprise mobile management a difficult task, as those devices are needed to be treated just like servers or desktops or any other input devices. They could be potential security risks too as they contain business-critical corporate data.

But despite all the risks, the numbers of companies that have deployed mobile device management (MDM) solution are still very low. Only 25 percent of the enterprises so far have deployed MDM and India still stands fairly low on the adoption curve. Going forward, it is going to be a significant area of investment for the enterprises.

Website Availability  

There is no doubt, websites are critical for any consumer-facing organizations in this digital era. Businesses need to ensure round-the-clock availability of their websites to keep up with the user-expectation. Any downtime on the website performance or availability will have a negative impact on the company’s revenue directly and can be detrimental for the businesses' reputation as well. The IT environment is so complex and as there is a lot a of interdependence among the components, that unless you consider the entire data you will not be able to correlate, see the anomaly and send a notification to the technician to solve it.

A basic website monitoring solution that gives an instant view of how end users are interacting with the website will be of help and that is important for all the companies irrespective of their sizes. This also helps to identify the root causes any performance degradation issues and take necessary measures to solve it easily.

Application Performance Management

This is going to be another area of focus for all the companies irrespective of their sizes, as they embrace digital. This is especially true for new web-based consumer-facing companies as any type of downtime and degradation in the consumer experience or website performance will impact the revenue directly. They need to ensure that more than just up and running, the systems need to perform in a way that will keep the customers engaged. That is the reason Application Performance Management (APM) is such a big deal nowadays.

Companies need to monitor and optimize application infrastructure irrespective of where the applications get deployed- in its own infrastructure on-premises or a shared infrastructure in the public or hybrid cloud environment. They need a single dashboard for the entire infrastructure.

To conclude...

These tools help by taking some of the loads off the IT managers and allow them to concentrate more on the other business-critical requirements. It is wise to consider some free tools before taking the investment decision and understand the difference it makes for their businesses.