End-to-end remote monitoring: Delivering high-quality business services
ICT is practically essential to every organisation and is increasingly playing a key strategic role in the customer-facing business services they provide. Understanding how different elements of ICT infrastructure support and interact to deliver these services is vital. For example, when a customer accesses a business’ web portal the process involves data networks, servers and applications working together - so if one element is not at optimum performance the customer may encounter a poor level of ‘business service’. Equally, these same ICT components may also support other business services which may be less impacted by a performance degradation, so prioritising technical problems based on the potential business impact is a critical part of the decision making process.
In today’s business environment ensuring service delivery and quality is paramount, therefore more joined-up thinking towards ICT systems monitoring is required. A recent study by Infonetics Research found that 3.6 per cent of annual revenue is lost due to downtime in large businesses. ICT departments traditionally operate in an organisation structure based on skill sets such as network management, servers, desktops, databases and applications, but monitoring ICT performance based on these same divisions does not ensure the quality of a business service. A business service transcends the ICT infrastructure and needs to be monitored accordingly.
Damovo believes that remote service level monitoring is the solution. This means measuring the quality of the business services provided by the ICT infrastructure in addition to the individual ICT components. How well a certain component performs is not necessarily a measure of overall service performance.
As businesses more closely align IT with their business objectives they look to develop appropriate Service Level Agreements (SLA). At Damovo we take service level monitoring a step further as we look to define and proactively monitor an SLA in terms of end to end real-time business service expectations, including, where appropriate, end-user experience.
ICT departments can now be simply alerted (by a call, SMS or email) to potential service issues – meaning that they can be dealt with before they become a problem. As businesses become increasingly service-orientated, reactive ICT monitoring will be insufficient as end users will demand the best levels of service 24/7. By taking a proactive end-to-end approach businesses stand to boost the customer experience and revenues!
For information on Damovo solutions and services for remote monitoring contact Glyn Owen, Services Business Manager.
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