In our experience, many clients find their production IT department is something of a black hole. Knowing what applications the business uses and which servers and software they depend on should, in theory, be straightforward but, as IT managers will be only too painfully aware, it rarely is.
With today’s complex IT infrastructures, getting to grips with the ever-multiplying number of applications on which different parts of the business rely, let alone working out the numerous dependencies, is a considerable undertaking.
It is not hard to see why such a knowledge gap can lead to problems when it comes to successful testing and recovery, IT virtualisation, IT audits, server consolidation, cost control and migrations.
Sungard Availability Services aims to remove these pain points with our new Discovery & Dependency Mapping (DDM) service.
How it works
The service uses an agentless probe(s), deployed at the customer’s site, to scan the IT environment within scope and populates the discovered information into Sungard AS’ centrally managed Configuration Management Database (CMDB). We then analyse the discovery data, map application to infrastructure dependencies and collaboratively map business processes to applications before providing reports on the findings to the customer. This enables customers to make informed decisions on production and recovery services based on facts rather than a best guess.
Of course, production environments change all the time – just one change per month for each system can add up to more than 10,000 configuration changes a year. DDM’s ongoing service provides customers with monthly change reports to ensure they always have an up-to-date picture of their IT environment.
While the Discovery & Dependency Mapping process is an integral part of Sungard AS’ Managed Recovery Programme (MRP), DDM will be available as a standalone service to all customers.
Benefits
- Accurate snapshot of the IT environment to inform strategy and investment decisions
- Eliminates dependence on ‘tribal knowledge’ and spreadsheets that are difficult to consolidate and keep current
- Scoped discovery allows customer to control what information they need to know to ensure relevance
- Enables production and recovery solutions to be right-sized so customers pay only for what they need
- No capital expenditure, licences or specialist skills required in-house to implement
- Time-to-Value deployment with pre-configured server setup at Sungard AS and lightweight agentless probe on customer premises so customers reap the benefits more quickly
- Gives customers the knowledge they need to effectively recover, migrate, consolidate or test specific applications
- Monthly Change Reports to keep customers abreast of unplanned production changes
If you’d like to discuss how Discovery & Dependency Mapping could benefit your organisation call us on 0808 223 0274 or email avail@sungardas.com