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Complexity of services in the IT infrastructure management area

As an established partner of HP, IBM, EMC, Microsoft, Team Quest, or Cisco - companies which provide all the necessary IT infrastructure used in business, we create infallible, pioneer solutions customized towards individual needs of our Customers. Reliable and tested HP technologies are the guarantee of the highest quality of our services. 

COMPLEXITY OF OUR OPERATION COVERS:

• analysis of current shape of operational infrastructure
• implementation, management and monitoring of the availability, efficiency and safety
• support for the implemented systems

Tools that we use allow us to maintain full supervision and management over all IT resources in the heterogeneous environment - starting with networks, through workstations, servers, data warehouses, and up to applications, which provides us with the view on the complete IT infrastructure from any perspective and place. Technical knowledge and business mechanisms recognition gives us a lot of freedom in the IT environment management area.

Our solutions shall put the IT infrastructure under full control due to providing your company with a set of tools for management: 

• Configuration Management; software distribution; inventory; remote control; licenses management
• Identity Management, resource access control, user management; user authorization and reliability, user life cycle
• Availability & Performance Management, Capacity Planning, network, system, databases, applications & services monitoring; fault anticipation and automated prevention
• Service Quality Management & Service Level Management
• Network Management
• Operational Management
• data & data storage; data management, disk resources management, Storage Area Networks Management  Backup & Storage Management

The effective IT infrastructure management shall reflect itself in the increase of reliability and availability of the systems, IT departments operational comfort and reduction of their operational costs. It allows for the detection and elimination of faults and errors, anticipation of system behavior, anticipation of a problem before it manifests itself, detection and elimination of incoherencies, effective implementation of an application, having a detailed visualization of IT environment and measurement of the level of resources usage by individual users and even charging them with appropriate costs. It is another step towards the full orientation of IT towards company business goals. In case of a more developed infrastructure, we recommend a process-based approach towards IT management. IT systems operating in companies are crucial and critical from the point of view of those companies. Even a short loss of a particular service availability of loss of quality of such service, noticeable by workers or customers of a particular company, may mean the decrease in effectiveness and increased costs of operation.

Using of integrated IT monitoring systems allows for an increase of company competitiveness, due to providing end-users with constant access to all the necessary services by reduction of system idle time, support for fault causes detection, potential errors anticipation, automatic reporting and elimination of some types of problems.  The level of complexity of IT systems leads to the situation when the automatization of their monitoring is not only advisable but even necessary. Such automated surveillance over IT services cannot be fully realized (due to many reasons, for instance because of life cycles of subsystems providing such services) without human operation. That’s why technological solutions offered by Wola Info are to be treated as advanced, specialist tools, dedicated to organization responsible for monitoring and maintaining of defined quality parameters of a service.

Objective quality of service (number-based definition of so-called ‘end-users’ feelings’) is translated into the necessity to constant monitoring of wide volume of technical parameters of IT environment components. The correct choice of measurement points, warning and alarm thresholds, as well as correlation and calculation of parameters coming from different infrastructure elements is a key to success, which is reaching of continuity of application and services operation. Management systems support the processes of IT-specific knowledge systematization, as well, they clarify access paths to them, support the diagnostics and evaluation of unwanted incidents effects (such as system faults or human errors).

IT services management

THE MOST IMPORTANT BENEFITS OF USING INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS ARE:

• an increase of availability of offered serviced due to fast detection and removal of faults as well as anticipation and prevention of crisis
• in increase of quality of Customer service due to increased and anticipated availability and efficiency of IT environment operation
• decrease of IT environment exploitation costs due to better planning and use of available resources (both technical and human)
• centralization of management processes making full proceduralization,  detection and control over changes possible

We create models of business services for dynamically developing sectors, basing on HP Software, for instance for telecommunication, financial, industrial or public administration sectors. Wola Info uses well-developed and verified HP ITSM when advising their Customers on IT organization model preparation.

Optimal use of intelligent technologies in form of Wola Info solutions

Discover possibilities that our high-quality components toolset offers and observe the increase of effectiveness at the whole organizational level. We offer efficient tools, which due to their unique functionality, will provide simple and centralized IT management. By merging HP technological potential with our own intellectual resources, we provide operation-optimization solutions for your company, which provides you and your staff with satisfaction. 

INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT

IT infrastructure of a modern company is a crucial component for its operation. Depending on the size of the organization it is characterized by its greater or smaller scale of complexity and sophistication. Our solutions shall help to efficiently control the infrastructure in your company, by increase in quality and comfort of work. When infrastructure management is concerned we specialize in the following:

• network, system, databases, applications & services monitoring; fault anticipation and automated prevention
• IT network topology visualization, Network Fault Management
• Distributed Job Scheduling
• Capacity Planning & Optimization
• Configuration Management; software distribution; inventory; remote control; licenses management
• Environment Discovery & Application Dependency Discovery
• Software & Hardware Inventory, Software Usage Tracking

IT SERVICES MANAGEMENT

As far as IT services management area is concerned, we provide support for the whole life cycle of a service, starting with its planning, throughout its design phase, implementation, launch and final delivery.

During IT service lifetime we monitor closely its three aspects:

• Operational Monitoring:
  • IT level service
  • examination of influence of each infrastructure element on the correct operation of service
  • IT infrastructure alteration influence on a service and its quality for users and business
  • The influence of alterations within a service on stability of IT infrastructure and possibility of providing other services
• End-user level monitoring:
  • SLO (Service Level Objective) and SLA (Service Level Agreement) parameters examination
  • SLM (Service Level Management), Service Quality Management
  • examination of service availability from various network points and for various types of users
  • Proactive Monitoring (the emulation of end-users’ activities by reenactment of their typical behavior)
  • Reactive Monitoring (monitoring of actual users’ behavior)
• Business Monitoring:
  • examination of current state of a business process via IT-provided service
  • Monitoring of Key Performance Indicator in on-line mode (KPI)

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) contains guidelines for the organization of processes of providing IT services within a company. It is a set of rules based on best practices developed by experts, consultants, IT solutions providers and end-users of tele-IT systems. ITIL is considered as the complete solution for IT services management and is a world-wide standard. It provides process-based approach towards IT services. It defines goals, main procedures and methods for launch and termination of a process.

It provides many guidelines for measurement, reports and audit of processes in order to verify and improve quality of provided services. It is fully scalable, i.e. suitable for different sized companies, as well as for those of different branches. Companies receive tangible benefits as a result of implementation of processes according to the ITIL indications.

Process management means that you can easily define such areas as:

• who
• when
• according to what rules
• what the subject of activity is
• what the final result of activities is

That’s why the full control over IT management areas is guaranteed. The transformation of IT Department into something of ITSM concept (IT Service Management) is undoubtedly the right move on your company’s development path. Well defined and efficient business processes operating on verge of business and IT are necessary for development and competitiveness of the company. By activating IT at this area we gain a proactive partner in realization of established goal of the company, and the satisfaction of staff of IT departments, who understand their influence on business, is increasing. As an effect of those activities, a further reduction of costs and maintaining of constant quality improvement control is possible.

The reorganization of IT department, by implementation of process-based IT services management, efficiently countermeasures the chaos, which is very often present in organizational structures. By using, among other things, ITIL standards, we would like to propose IT services management via processes. IT services are an integral part of any business, which is reflected in commonly known saying: „IT is business and business is IT”. By specializing in defining of goals and rules of the process operating in your company, we describe exactly the scope of operations to be realized in the particular area. We shall present an analysis of potential risks, and at the same time give you ways to minimize those dangers.   

IT ORGANIZATION MANAGEMENT

IT processes management supported by Wola Info means more than just the scope defined in ITIL. It also means the holistic approach to IT operation, particularly in case of using IT according to business needs.

IT organization management consists of:

• Planning (enterprises being realized, adjustment towards Customers’, users’ and business needs)
• Administration (IT management)
• IT operation monitoring (monitoring of provided services and business processes as well as the quality of ITIL processes)

Processes we provide services for:

• Value Based Management
• Cost Management and Optimization
• IT Asset Management
• IT-realized Enterprise Management
• Project Budget Management
• Project Risk Management
• Project Realization Management
• Project Range Management
• Project HR Management

Optimization of our operation during the realization of projects is based on the idea of IT Governance. We propose a transfer of idea of business-oriented IT services into business-oriented realization of projects via activation of units necessary for correct and on-time termination of works as part of decision making level. Using this approach shall reduce the risk of failure, responsibilities shall be distributed more equally and there will an increase in motivation of people crucial for the success of the project.

SERVICE LIFECYCLE

According to the ITIL standard actualization, we concentrate our efforts on the service lifecycle phases listed below:

• Service Delivery
• Service Exploitation
• Service Design
• Constant Upgrade of the Service
  • Business & IT integration - an integration of two strategies - this of business and this of IT services
  • Value Network Integration - an integration, as a next phase of IT & Business integration process; interconnection between the best ITIL practices and business benefits, ROI calculations included
  • Service Portfolio Dynamics - a dynamically managed Service, for the whole lifecycle of the service
  • Holistic Lifecycle of Service Management - ITIL uses the term: „holistic lifecycle of service management”, which serves as a countermeasure to ‘process silos’ phenomenon, which makes new service creation difficult

KEY POINTS OF OUR SPECIALISATION:

• Incident Management
• IT Change Management
• Configuration Management
• Environment Discovery & Application Dependency Discovery
• Software & Hardware Inventory, Software Usage Tracking
• Business Process Monitoring
• Network Fault Management - network topology visualization
• Capacity Planning & Optimization
• Monitoring of application, systems and system processes, IT resources management - Availability & Performance Management
• Quality & Assurance Management of the application
• SLM - Service Level Management, Service Quality Management) for the full lifecycle of the service
• Network Performance Management
• SOA Governance
• Presentation & Reports
• Information Lifecycle Management
• What-if analysis - testing and simulation of alterations
• Distributed Job Scheduling
• Service Management

We also use specialized software for particular functions in order to address IT management on more complex levels, for instance:

• TeamQuest – products for a detailed analysis of resource management planning
• Cisco – CiscoWorks products line for the network hardware configuration management
• SWAT - Wola Info own solutions (SWAT Documenter has an HP certificate)

The above mentioned areas, when correctly defined and automated, will allow for more rational task management. The identification of problems is time-optimized, which improves the work environment, making it considerably more effective and friendly. The radical improvement of management of the course of works in situation of change, as well as the reduction of costs are visible.

Our solutions in ITSM range are always valid where effective reaction is required or where time and effectiveness matter. Experienced team of Wola Info architects possesses a high level of knowledge of best ITIL practices. We address almost all aspects and solution areas of ITSM. We take responsibility for holistic preparation of you organization for a business-oriented IT transformation, as well as for ITSM-based initiation of processes. We use the IT services methodology (ITIL „best practice”) and our knowledge and experience, we prepare and run training and courses for users and we help them to upgrade their competencies and skills. We always use a suitable set of IT solutions which serve as IT management support. 

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