SYSTEM MANAGEMENT

A central management system has become unavoidable in today's complex Information Technologies (IT) infrastructure. However, the process of managing these different environments/components in the IT infrastructure in silos makes it difficult to find out the actual root causes of problems and to understand the actual effect of seemingly independent problems on the business processes.

IT infrastructure is one of the most important factors that determine the quality of service given by the organisation to its internal and external customers. Therefore, all investments in the IT infrastructure must be manageable, measurable and reportable. The most important aim for this is to continuously improve the service infrastructure provided by IT in order to make direct contributions to the business efficiency of the organisation.

Business Service Management (BSM) vision is the management of Information Technologies (IT) resources and processes from the perspective of business objectives.

Believing that companies which adopt Business Service Management vision and effectively manage the IT infrastructure can increase their business success, Gantek Teknoloji has become the Master Distributor of BMC Software in Turkey, the leading software company in the sector, to provide integrated IT Service Management Solutions.

Business Service Management is based on linking the business operations (people, processes and work flow) to the technology infrastructure that supports these operations (systems, databases, networks and applications). As a result of this relation, it is much easier to manage how the IT processes affect the business or, just the opposite, how the business changes affect the IT infrastructure. Using this approach, businesses can shape their IT decisions to achieve their important business objectives and immediately respond to the issues with commercial priority. The result will be effective management when delivering business services and better overall decisions.

Using ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) as the reference for developing the Business Service Management vision, BMC Software has developed a methodology to determine the critical gaps between the technology infrastructure and the business processes, to optimize the existing systems and to identify and implement the required new systems. Business Service Management - Routes to Value principles which have been prepared for this purpose help to implement this vision through eight different processes. This phased approach allows businesses to get results in a much shorter time in the process to Business Service Management.

Service Level Management
Most Service Level Agreements are written by IT units using a language that only IT employees can understand. Unfortunately, technical performance of infrastructure components is not related to what must be done in terms of business. Therefore, Service Level Management solutions are used to manage the relation between IT resources and customers at business processes level to improve your ability to meet business user demands.

Service Level Management solutions;

• Allow making IT and business contracts to define the service levels that will meet the business priorities which are important for the end user.
• Allow effective provision, viewing and measuring of the end-to-end service levels expected by customers.
• Allows managing service objectives by integrating them with the business service model.
• Automate support functions by relating Service Level Agreements to Service Desk and IT System Monitoring, End-to-End Transaction Management and reporting solutions.

Incident and Problem Management
Generally Service Desk does not have the information that is needed to quickly restart the failed business operations. Today, with increasing dependence of critical business services on IT, it has become more important to define the service threats proactively, identify their priorities and solve them.

In order to minimise interruptions, Incident and Problem Management solutions establish the contact between the Service Desk and the Incident Management to connect service support to business processes. In case of any service interruption, it helps you to quickly return the service operation to normal status in order to minimise the adverse effects of these interruption on the business.

Incident and Problem Management solutions;

• Help establish a business service call recording system which has a data archive for inquiry and an escalation system which gives priority to events according to service levels.
• Make a comprehensive integration using third party inventory discovery tools, network and system management products, ERP and CRM applications and Web services in order to increase the efficiency of existing IT investments.
• Increase the efficiency of service desk to get better results from investments: help solve the problems faster in order to minimise in-situ help requirements and reduce service desk call volume.
• Connect critical business services to incidents, problems and service level agreements.
• Integrate totally different service desks under the function of a single service desk.
• Allow smooth integration of service desk with network, application and system management solutions.

 
Infrastructure and Application Management
In order to ensure IT-Business conformance, organisations must apply a coherent methodology among technology solutions, automate repeated tasks and have an infrastructure that gives current critical information about availability, planning and performance metrics.

Infrastructure and Application Management solutions provide concrete solutions in the process from batch and online job scheduling to performance, resource usage and reporting, and automatic error management.

Infrastructure and Application Management solutions;

• Provide integrated management tools for all platforms and applications to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of IT personnel.
• Provide tools that will identify the problems without affecting service levels and secure the service level by mobilising the related corrective mechanisms.
• Provide an integrated infrastructure management for Mainframe, Distributed Systems, Desktop and Mobile Systems.
• Provide a collective business management infrastructure that will perform management by prioritising batch and online business flows according to their relation to business processes.

Service Impact and Incident Management
Managing business related IT services are a challenge faced by many IT organisations. Many companies fail to prioritise IT activities according to their impact on business, therefore find it difficult to find the root cause of business interruptions in the IT infrastructure.

Service Impact and Incident Management solutions establish a concrete connection between the IT infrastructure and the users who receive various services from that infrastructure in order to present a direct route to Business Service Management.

Service Impact and Incident Management solutions;

• Allow establishing a clear connection between the infrastructure and the business services by joining the business processes and IT infrastructure at organisational, process and tool levels.
• Facilitate the solution process by making it easier to understand the impact of current problems on business processes.
• Ensure higher return from investment by prioritising incident solutions for the most critical business services depending on the highest income and expense impact.
• Link IT infrastructure components with the supported business services within a service model.
• Allows integration to the Service Desk to establish the infrastructure needed to secure service levels from every aspect.

Asset Management and Discovery
Asset Management and Discovery includes solutions for identifying, classifying and managing the lifecycle of assets in the IT infrastructure. By correctly managing the IT assets, the existing IT resources can be used more efficiently and budget can be utilized more effectively when making purchases for new requirements.

Asset Management and Discovery solutions;

• Allow automatic discovery of the IT infrastructure components and the relations among these components.
• Use IT asset management to reduce manual inventory management procedures and to provide cost savings and increase return of investment by means of the distribution and control of hardware and software assets.
• Allow interdependent management of all assets in a central database. 
• Allow managing asset agreements and total ownership costs.
• Provide the possibility of collecting data to a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) from different discovery solutions and identifying the infrastructure components of these data.

Change and Configuration Management
Change and Configuration Management allows you to manage the IT environment and all changes in order to ensure that these changes in the production environment are applied quickly, correctly and that critical business services are not affected by unsuitable changes.

Change and Configuration Management solutions;

• Increase the efficiency of change life cycle using process-based change management solutions.
• Provide policy-based configuration management solutions that automate the packaging, configuration, supply and repair of software and updates.
• Provide the opportunity to build a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) that allows all processes to make use of a common information source.
• Automate the change lifecycle and provide management tools that meet the change demands in the most proper way.
• Manage the processes required to make the desired configuration after identifying the non-standard configurations in IT environment.

Capacity Management and Supply
Capacity Management and Supply inspects resource utilisation efficiency while identifying the capacity according to business needs to develop "demand based" environments. Therefore, besides minimising the costs, it also prepares the infrastructure that will manage the resource requirements to meet the Service Level Agreements.

Business requirements can change within seconds. IT must be ready to manage the impact of these changes and provide the resources effectively. Without the ability to anticipate the needs, there may be the risk of not using the full capacity, or worse, the risk of missing capacity.

Capacity Management and solutions;

• Provide a comprehensive tool set that minimises the costs and the service level risks to ensure all performance and capacity requirements of business services are met.
• Help establish a planned and reproducible process; thus IT resources can be provided according to business requirements.
• Provide solutions that will determine the complex relations between the changes that depend on the business life cycle and the resource capacity requirements for intelligent and timely resource supply.
• Allows higher return from investment by optimising resource usage, reducing hardware capital costs, and increasing system availability and end user efficiency.
• Collects performance metrics that will determine capacity requirements according to business needs by analysing usage trends.
• Provide infrastructure solutions for Server Virtualization.

Identity Management
Identity Management allows managing access to resources by business policies and regulations, by means of ensuring central management of identities and access authorisation and reducing operational costs. 

Critical data and asset protection is a business obligation. However, ensuring access to the right data by the right people at the right time, and without preventing efficiency, is a challenge that is constantly faced by many organisations.

Identity Management solutions;

• Provide an infrastructure that allows provisioning and de-provisioning user identities in conjunction with the information obtained from human resources management systems.
• Allows managing the users' right of access to information and applications according to the rules and the specific user's role descriptions in the organisation.
• Provide policy based management solutions that reinforce password policies and change demands.
• Reduce the workload of Service Desk by allowing users to manage their passwords.
• Ensure conformance to regulations that govern the access procedures such as Basel II and Sarbanes-Oxley.
• Automatically inform IT personnel about security incidents and take policy based improvement steps.
• Provides flexible reporting capabilities that will be compatible with policy or management demands.