Ask the Expert: From chaos to compliance

Virtualized data centres need operational excellence

Virtualized data centres are key in responding to top challenges encountered by IT administrators in recent years. They maximise utilisation of existing resources, ensure faster response to business needs with shorter and simplified provisioning processes, and increase availability as a result of hardware independence and mobility of the virtualized resources. This allows zero downtime maintenance and fast recovery times in case of failure or disaster.

The virtualized data centre is mainly about technology. The challenge of leveraging virtualized data centres comes when you introduce the human factor. Technology is still operated by humans that need to acquire the proper skill set. Infrastructure teams - under higher pressure from shorter process cycles - often perform in reactive mode, causing degradation of service quality. The only way to ensure service excellence in today’s environment is to implement business best practices and enforce operational procedures.

Quality, processes and compliance

Every quality management system (QMS) promises quality and performance improvements, as well as increased business opportunities once key processes have been identified, documented, measured and improved. Industries subject to specific regulations will expect much more from their QMS. Companies want their QMS to help them comply with the IT control section of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (like the FDA’s validation requirements or ITIL best practices).

Consequently, corporations usually end up deploying business process automation (BPA) systems to automate, track and improve the required processes. The difficulty resides in the level or technology depth of the automation.

Different levels of integration

“Work order” based systems, with e-mail or web order delivery, usually improve process efficiency by 50 percent compared to manual and paper run book based systems. But this level of integration does not reduce operational risk or complexity of the process. Human error risk is still high since the process is tracked by the process automation system, relying people to manually perform operations. Complexity is not reduced since the process operator must be knowledgeable about the technology and is only partially alleviated from working in reactive mode.

Fully automated and integrated systems - usually using SOA - provide the best technical solution, as they reduce time, risk and therefore cost of the process. They also nullify complexity, since the technology is abstracted from the requester with an automated process, usually bypassing IT resources. Infrastructure teams can then deploy their talents on more strategic activities. The problem with this solution is in the complexity of the implementation, which most of the time requires additional tools, time and external expertise. Implementation of a new process or change of an existing one often requires too much time and highly skilled resources, which contradicts the business agility requirements of today’s corporations.

Optimal level of integration

The optimal depth of automation is in systems that allow both deep technological integration of an SOA solution and the ease of change of a classical “work order” BPA solution. You need automated processes that provide audit trails required for compliance. You also need the ability to implement the most technical, sometimes low level, processes of a virtualized data centre that can be changed by low-skilled IT team members. The solution should enable you to present these processes in a web site that integrates into your corporate intranet, abstracting complexity for end-users and turning most IT requests into self-service operations. Finally you want a packaging and distribution mechanism for the processes that complies with your internal security policies, and allows proper change management procedures to be applied in production environments.

This optimal solution will address all quality and compliance requirements, and achieve and sustain the most stringent cost, time and risk reduction objectives. More importantly it will maintain the agility needed for in house process implementation and maintenance in a short change cycle environment.

Stefan Hochuli Paychère is CTO and co-founder of Dunes. Under Stefan's technical leadership, Dunes created the first true open framework to perform full business process automation of virtual and physical data centres. Stefan has over 14 years experience in computer hardware and software development areas going from real time embedded systems to multi-tiered enterprise business systems.