Technology Solution Provider IDs Key Tools that Give IT Pros
Visibility & Control throughout the Cloud
Farmington Hills, MI, April 24, 2012
– Today, Logicalis, an international IT solutions and
managed services provider (http://www.us.logicalis.com/),
unveiled a list of the top five tools CIOs should demand from any
prospective cloud or managed services partner. When CIOs make
the decision to move select IT functions to the cloud or to a
managed services environment, monitoring the physical
infrastructure (servers, storage, network, etc.) becomes the
responsibility of the service provider. However, dedicated IT
pros are not satisfied with an “out of sight, out of mind”
philosophy. To help these IT pros navigate the widening cloud
landscape, Logicalis has created a checklist of tools to help them
evaluate prospective cloud partners.
“CIOs in charge of an enterprise-class
infrastructure may easily relinquish the day-to-day management and
maintenance tasks that become the responsibility of the cloud or
managed services provider, but that doesn’t mean they want to be in
the dark,” says Michael Strysik, solution architect for
Logicalis. “In fact, when they are selecting their cloud or
managed services partners, it’s critical that IT professionals
conduct site visits, view the provider’s operations center, and
find out what toolsets a prospective provider offers that will give
them full visibility into the functionality of their cloud.”
Tools CIOs Should Demand from their
Cloud Providers
1. ITSM Toolset: An ITSM
toolset is essentially an ERP system for IT – a central repository
of information that gives both the provider and the customer a
finger on the pulse of the customer’s cloud environment. It’s
the customer’s portal to reports for capacity planning, historical
trending analysis, and tracking information for every end-point or
device in that database. The ITSM toolset is a single pane of
glass view from which both the provider and customer can see how
every device in the environment is functioning.
2. Enterprise Monitoring
Probes: Systems are running 24/7 these days, making it
necessary to have enterprise-class tools or probes that can monitor
IT infrastructure around the clock. The right probes have
software agents that can gather SNMP data for device polling and
are integrated with the ITSM toolset as well. It is the
provider’s way of monitoring the client’s environment around the
clock and, if something goes bump in the night, being alerted
quickly, identifying the problem and remediating within the time
specified by the customer’s SLA.
3. User Activity Monitoring:
It’s crucial to know who has changed what and when. As a
result, CIOs should insist that their providers employ a screen
capturing tool that tracks and logs any type of activity or change
made to their systems. If there is an incident, an outage or
a security concern, every step can be retraced, giving the customer
peace of mind and the provider a starting point when looking for
answers.
4. Synthetic Transaction
Monitoring: How long does it take to submit, complete and
return an application request to a user? End-user response
measurement, or synthetic transaction monitoring, can provide the
most precise gauge of user experiences. Surprisingly,
although synthetic transaction monitoring can offer the best way to
pinpoint problems and test the performance of applications in the
cloud, it is often the most overlooked tool in a cloud provider’s
toolbox.
5. WAN Acceleration: Certain
applications, no matter where they are located, can take
significant amounts of time to open and run. An ERP package,
for example, could take as long as four to five minutes to open,
but using a WAN acceleration tool combined with some up-front
configuration work, that time-to-open can be reduced to less than
30 seconds. This kind of tool isn’t right in every
circumstance, but when performance improvements are needed, it is
definitely a must-have in a cloud provider’s arsenal.
- What sets Logicalis apart from other cloud
providers? Find out here
- Learn about Logicalis’ managed services tools
and processes in this short four-minute
video.
About Logicalis
Logicalis is an international IT solutions and
managed services provider with a breadth of knowledge and expertise
in communications and collaboration; data center and cloud
services; and managed services.
Logicalis Group employs over 2,500 people
worldwide, including highly trained service specialists who design,
specify, deploy and manage complex ICT infrastructures to meet the
needs of over 6,000 corporate and public sector customers. To
achieve this, Logicalis maintains strong partnerships with
technology leaders such as Cisco, HP, IBM and Microsoft.
The Logicalis Group has annualized revenues of
over $1 billion, from operations in the UK, US, Germany, South
America and Asia Pacific, and is fast establishing itself as one of
the leading IT and Communications solution integrators,
specializing in the areas of advanced technologies and
services.
The Logicalis Group is a division of Datatec
Limited, listed on the Johannesburg and London AIM Stock Exchanges,
with revenues of approximately $5 billion.
For more information, visit http://www.us.logicalis.com/