Mobile devices and high-speed Internet are driving some businesses and consumers crazy. Today, we can access required information, accomplish business tasks or get things done without moving anywhere. Thanks to the underlying IT infrastructure which comprises hundreds and thousands of network devices, servers and applications for making this possible. However, it is easier said than done.
In reality, providing business-critical services at agreed service levels is not easy because numerous factors such as faulty configuration changes, bandwidth, network performance and attacks affect them. To ensure seamless availability of business-critical services, IT teams have to overcome such challenges. Mostly, these kinds of challenges vary from one company to another based on business needs.
In January 2017, ManageEngine surveyed 150 IT managers, network administrators, CIOs and other IT professionals to find out the top five challenges that might impact IT in 2017:
1. Handling security threats
2. Managing network changes due to the addition of users/applications
3. Budget cuts
4. Keeping track of unauthorized configuration changes
5. Juggling between multiple tools for network management
If you take a closer look at these challenges, most of them have one thing in common. Security threats, budget cuts, managing configuration changes and juggling between multiple tools are dependent on the management tools that IT teams have in place.
Using one tool for one problem used to be the norm in IT, which is the root cause for all such challenges. This model worked when mobile devices and cloud adoption were minimal. However, now end users are very conscious about the quality of services that they use. Even a small delay or timeout issue can make them furious and consider other possible options. It is a tough task for the IT team to ensure 24x7 delivery of business services at great quality.
Having the right set of management tools can help overcome or eliminate these challenges completely. One integrated IT management solution that offers visibility into network, server and application infrastructures can help IT teams discover issues proactively. It should offer correlation between the performance and fault data that helps admins find the root cause of the issue easily and correct it at an early stage so that end users are not affected. With one tool to manage, admins can spend less time on maintenance efforts, such as data backups and service pack upgrades.
