5 common IT operations challenges: Strategies to overcome them for modern enterprises
Table of Contents
- 1. Distributed infrastructure and data silos: Need for centralization
- 2. Lack of cybersecurity and vulnerability remediation prioritization
- 3. Need to build a composable enterprise of the future: Need for collaboration
- 4. The need for effective change management
- 5. Challenges in scaling IT infrastructure and operations
- IT operations challenges: Virima’s all-in-one platform at your rescue
Efficient IT operations are the backbone of any organization. And why won’t this be? IT operations can entail managing infrastructure, responding to incidents, tackling problems, handling change, and release. But what aspect of IT operations an organization can undertake varies depending on its industry, size, and complexity of the technology in use.
Thus, the umbrella term IT operations can also include operating a service desk and ensuring IT security and compliance.
Along with such vast scope comes inherent IT operations challenges. These challenges need to be tackled whether you aim to optimize your organization’s IT operations as a decision-maker or enhance your team’s effectiveness as a system admin or roles alike.
In this blog post, we will delve into the five most common IT operations challenges faced by modern enterprises and provide practical solutions to help overcome them.
1. Distributed infrastructure and data silos: Need for centralization
Modern enterprises are increasingly adopting multi-cloud architecture to meet their business needs. In fact, according to a recent survey, 90% of large organizations have deployed multi-cloud architecture. However, with multi-cloud adoption comes the challenge of managing distributed infrastructure and data silos. Such distribution leads to data duplication, inconsistent processes, and limited visibility into organization-wide data.
This lack of centralized visibility makes it difficult for IT teams to support their products, and manage IT infrastructure and services efficiently. Say you need to support over 40 vendor applications, then you need a centralized hub to access every detail of those applications to respond to incidents. That’s why having a centralized IT operations management system (ITOM) is crucial for modern enterprises.
A robust CMDB at your rescue: Tackling IT operations challenge no 1
One solution to this challenge is Virima’s CMDB, a centralized configuration management database that can provide a single source of truth for all IT operations. With Virima, organizations can set up a central as well as divisional CMDB. One is to centralize control and visualization, while the other is for each line of business or department. This divisional democratization allows each department to manage its part of the IT infrastructure under the same organizational policies and procedures.
But the question erupts, how to keep your CMDBs current amid so many organization-wide changes or updates across hybrid IT infrastructure?
That’s where the integrated Virima Discovery features come in. Its agentless IP-based discovery keeps the CMDB current by discovering all the IT assets, including servers, workstations, software, and more, across multi-cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
But how far does the flat CMDB data help you make fast and sound decisions? You need to make the data “operationalized.” Virima’s service maps derive actionable intelligence in the form of dynamic interactable maps from simple configuration knowledge.
So, you get visualization for centralized information in CMDB. This visualization helps IT teams to easily identify critical services assets, and find out the dependency between them, and manage them.
2. Lack of cybersecurity and vulnerability remediation prioritization
This IT operations challenge concerns the integrity of an organization’s data and systems. When hybrid IT infrastructure deployment is so common, 82% of breaches for organizations involve data stored in the cloud. The reasons include the lack of visibility across hybrid IT environments as well as weak data protection as those move across databases, clouds, services, and apps.
Tackling them requires effective management of cybersecurity efforts across the digital perimeter of an organization. However, effective management doesn’t become a reality for many organizations because of a lack of consolidated asset and threat information, not having the right system to rate vulnerabilities, and inadequate reporting on cybersecurity risk management processes.
How Virima helps with cybersecurity in three steps
To tackle the IT operations challenges of cybersecurity and vulnerability, Virima assists organizations in handling cybersecurity in three steps:
Step 1: Asset and threat Info consolidation
Virima’s robust discovery capabilities and Windows agents ensure that no assets are left unaccounted for. This combined discovery for hybrid IT infrastructure provides persistent monitoring and updates on changes, incidents, and threats as they happen.
Here, Virima CMDB consolidates this asset information as a centralized repository. Whereas the links to NIST’s National Vulnerability Database (NVD) facilitate efficient security-related decision-making as all discovery data in CMDB is checked for known CPE and CVE.
Step 2: Criticality rating of vulnerabilities
The same NVD vulnerabilities are overlaid on service maps through Virima’s ViVID™ feature. These visual vulnerabilities and alerts provide insightful information about potential threats. The best thing is that you can rate vulnerabilities based on their inherent severity and perceived impact.
Additionally, Virima’s Scoring Vulnerability Rating (SVR) allows organizations to create a customizable criticality scoring system. You can assign a score to each application, asset, and service to identify and track the most crucial assets. Because of this system, you can prioritize vulnerability remediation efforts.
Step 3: Setting the stage for cybersecurity actions
Detailed reports play a key role in taking informed cybersecurity actions. Virima provides detailed vulnerability reports on an organization’s vulnerability management efforts and helps identify potential gaps in its cybersecurity risk management processes. As you share it with relevant stakeholders within organizations, you can quickly take appropriate actions to address any vulnerabilities and strengthen your overall security posture.
3. Need to build a composable enterprise of the future: Need for collaboration
Among the common IT operations challenges, one of the most difficult is to meet evolving customer demand in line with rapid technological innovation. Tackling this requires building a composable enterprise of the future. The composable enterprise is an adaptive organization that can quickly respond to changing market conditions.
It uses a modular approach to IT infrastructure and services. This means leveraging the API economy, where components are broken down into smaller services or PBCs (packaged business capabilities). Achieving this requires close collaboration and coordination between central IT and business processes to manage varied IT operations.
Unfortunately, many organizations still struggle with miscommunication-driven delays in incident response and a lack of collaboration between these teams. Reports suggest that 93% of companies acknowledge the need for moderate to comprehensive collaboration between central IT and other LOBs.
Virima offers a range of features and solutions to improve collaboration, for example, to get smoother incident response and overall IT operations.
Virima service maps for shared understanding
Effective collaboration on IT operations largely depends on sharing understanding. This shared understanding includes asset relationships, service dependencies, and links between applications and services. Virima’s service maps provide a shared understanding of relationships and dependencies between IT assets, applications, and services.
These maps enable teams to visualize and understand the impact of incidents and changes across the entire IT ecosystem. This visualization becomes also important for managing the hybrid infrastructure and ensuring security. This shared view promotes better cross-divisional collaboration and decision-making needed as you take a modular approach to IT infrastructure.
As these maps are automatically created from updated configuration item (CI) details from both the central and divisional CMDBs, it helps connect the IT dots easily.
Virima ASD for knowledge gap filling
As you tackle IT operations challenges regarding collaboration, Virima’s Autonomic Social Discovery module also facilitates cross-divisional collaboration between asset and process owners. It does so by filling the knowledge gaps with hard-to-discover information such as ownership information, lifecycle status, policies, and service level agreements (SLAs) across the central and divisional CMDBs.
By breaking down divisional silos, the ASD module enables teams to collaborate effectively and leverage collective expertise for improved IT operations.
4. The need for effective change management
No matter what industry you’re in, the pain of change management hunts you everywhere. And this brings us close to IT operations challenges related to change. An effective change management process ensures that changes to IT infrastructure and services are implemented smoothly and with minimal disruption. The presence of a structured approach to change management means 93% more likelihood of exceeding objectives.
Despite this, many organizations face inefficiencies due to the absence of robust toolsets in their change management processes. These inefficiencies can lead to impact evaluations, delays in change approvals, and increase the risk of errors during change implementation.
How Virima brings efficiency to change management
Virima offers a range of features that enable organizations to implement changes more efficiently.
Streamlined change impact analysis
As mentioned earlier, the same application dependency mapping provides a dynamic and interactive view of application relationships, infrastructure dependencies, and business services. This feature allows change managers to understand the impact of proposed changes before going to change approval boards. So organizations can make informed decisions about change requests. This helps reduce the time for change request evaluation for normal changes and increases the success rate of emergency changes.
Change approval with near real-time data
Once you understand the possible change impact, you need near real-time ITSM data to evaluate change requests. Virima’s ViVID™ feature provides near real-time change, incident, and NVD vulnerability data overlays on the service maps. This allows organizations to access the impact of changes backed by near real-time data. With ViVID™, appropriate stakeholders can quickly find answers to important questions such as “Who will be impacted?”, “What changed?” and “Which assets have risks?”.
5. Challenges in scaling IT infrastructure and operations
As the need to expand IT infrastructure arises for an organization, scaling becomes one of the key IT operations challenges. The need of the hour is to bring agility and efficiency in scaling IT infrastructure and operations.
The answer lies in structured automation. It brings flexibility and efficiency in infrastructure deployment. But only with the right tools can organizations overcome the scalability hurdles while ensuring optimal IT service delivery.
Maintain the same IT service delivery level with ITSM Integrations
Virima’s integration with major IT service management (ITSM) platforms, such as Jira, ServiceNow, and Ivanti, ensures optimal IT service delivery as organizations scale their IT infrastructure. As you deploy IT assets to your infrastructure, these integrations allow a bi-directional exchange of updated and accurate asset information between Virima’s CMDB and the ITSM platforms.
So all the asset information is always up to date. As accurate asset details are the backbone of optimal IT service delivery, the integration ensures that IT services are delivered efficiently at scale.
Visibility and control over Multi-Cloud environment
As organizations deploy resources and build processes in multi-cloud environments, such as AWS and Azure, Virima enables them to take control of all asset information. You can keep track of assets and visualize relationships through service maps.
Moreover, with the rule-based updates to the CMDB, asset information is automatically updated as changes occur. So, amid the scaling efforts, you’re in control of all the changes happening.
IT operations challenges: Virima’s all-in-one platform at your rescue
No matter what IT operations challenges are closest to you, tackling each requires a thorough awareness of the problem, the right approach, and the tools to support it.
Virima’s all-in-one platform provides you with the right tools to deal with IT operations challenges.
Book a demo today to learn more!
