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Category: IT as Code

Why SDN’s Hot Streak Continues in 2020
The software-defined networking (SDN) market is expected to grow by double-digits between now and 2023, driven by the increasing mainstream adoption of this technology. And for good reason: SDN gives IT the ability to make changes through software code instead of reconfiguring each device, and manage data traffic from a central console to move it in any direction.

Communication gear still drives the physical movement of bits, but software drives the data plan and the control plan. This allows network managers—and even applications—to dynamically manage network resources based on complex system needs. SDN supports real-time integration across multiple servers, services and clouds, and it also processes huge volumes of data. IT departments can now overcome traditional networking issues such as performance bottlenecks and develop a more responsive network strategy.

SDN Plays a Critical Role in Cloud Adoption and Improves Security for IT Departments

SDN architecture integrates easily with cloud-based environments, both public and private ones. This gives network managers greater flexibility, speed and automation in managing their network clouds.

On the security front, SDN allows an IT department to divide a network connection between an end user and the data center, and provide different security settings for the various types of network traffic. For example, a network could have one public-facing, low security network without any sensitive information. But another network segment could have a software-based firewall and encryption policies that allow for more sensitive data to travel over it. Having the ability to match security policies to specific workloads is a key advantage of SDN.

One of the hottest trends with SDN is microsegmentation, where IT professionals customize security settings to different types of traffic. With this security model, the goal is to apply segmentation rules down to the workload or application. This mitigates the likelihood of an attacker migrating between compromised workloads or applications to others. Basically, microsegmentation creates intelligent groupings of workloads based on their characteristics as communicated inside the data center. This approach does not depend on dynamically changing networks, specific business or technical requirements which means microsegmentation provides enhanced security.

The software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) takes SDN even further by connecting enterprise networks over large geographical areas, such as branch offices and data centers. Traditional WAN connections typically needed technology that required special proprietary hardware. SD-WAN moves more of the network control into the cloud through software, allowing for greater scalability, flexibility and reduced hardware costs. SD-WAN is expected to grow even faster than SDN in the coming years for several reasons:
- Greater reliability of application performance, a huge advantage for users in today’s digital workspaces.
- High level of connection security for cloud applications without performance trade-offs.
- Increased bandwidth which reduces congestion and slowdowns.
- More business agility through faster deployments of new applications.
- Simpler IT administration through a centralized console instead of in-field configurations.
SDN and its offspring of SD-WANs continue to defy expectations in creating greater agility, flexibility, security and reliability. Leading-edge IT organizations are embracing the imperatives of digital transformation through SDN and SD-WAN to provide for agile deployment, provisioning and operational management.

— Melinda Cross
March 27, 2020
COVID-19 Reaction: Massive Spike in IT Incidents

A report published this week by PagerDuty, a provider of an incident management platform, finds organizations that rely on the platform to manage IT issues are managing on average double the number of incidents since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In some industry segments, such as online learning services, travel and entertainment services, the number of incidents has increased 11-fold, the report noted.

Rachel Obstler, vice president of product for PagerDuty, said with more people at home, online services that are seeing a spike in use while at the same time deploying new code to drive additional services are clearly stressed. Enterprise IT organizations, meanwhile, are now dealing with large numbers of employees trying to remotely access a wide range of applications simultaneously. Incidents now range from relatively simple authentication issues to accelerating the rollout of a digital business initiative to help maintain business continuity, she noted.

Many of those organizations were already short of staff before the COVID-19 pandemic so longstanding challenges in many cases are now being further exacerbated, added Obstler. In addition, organizations that are rushing to deploy applications to enable their organizations to maintain business continuity are likely to not have tested those applications as thoroughly as they once might have. Inevitably, that decision will result in more IT incidents as issues are discovered after those applications are deployed in a production environment.

Naturally, there may be a temptation to suspend rollouts of new applications. However, with millions of individuals now required to work from home for an indefinite amount of time, digital business applications may be the only way to engage those individuals. In fact, Obstler noted that as working remotely becomes the new normal, many people are about to become a lot more proficient at both working and shopping from home. As such, digital business applications may soon become the primary medium through which organizations engage their end customers.

On the plus side, Obstler said it’s now relatively simple to deliver IT services from anywhere in the world, so there is an opportunity to bulk up existing IT support staff. Of course, the pool of IT professionals who are available to hire should also increase as vertical industries such as the travel and hospitality sectors essentially shut down.

It’s too early to say precisely how the COVID-19 pandemic will impact the IT sector. While there will certainly be layoffs, many organizations will be loath to let go of IT staff who will be difficult to replace once the immediate economic recession ends. Countries around the world are also making funds available to companies on the condition they keep layoffs to a minimum.

Regardless of how many IT people are retained, however, the remaining IT staff will continue to be stressed. Many organizations are going to have to re-engineer IT processes by, for example, embracing best DevOps practices on the fly to adjust to a new reality. Many of the IT issues about to be encountered might not always be within the control of IT teams to address. However, business leaders will expect that one way or another those IT staff will come up with the innovative workarounds needed to enable the business to continue to survive and thrive.

— Mike Vizard

March 26, 2020
Storj Labs Unfurls Decentralized Storage Service

Storj Labs has made generally available a distributed storage platform based on the excess capacity available on devices ranging from servers to individual desktops.

Company CEO Ben Golub said the goal is to provide IT organizations with an alternative to storing data inexpensively using storage resources that have been vetted by Storj Labs.

At the core of the Tardigrade Decentralized Cloud Storage Service provided by Storj Labs is an open source object storage system that is compatible with the S3 application programming interface (API) defined by Amazon Web Services (AWS). That object storage system distributes 80 slices of a file across a subset of thousands of nodes that each contain only a slice of the data required to reconstruct that file when needed. Only 29 of those slices are needed to reconstruct a file, so Golub said it’s relatively simple to ensure data is secure without having to manage encryption keys.

Following an extensive beta test of the Tardigrade, the company claims to have achieved 99.95% availability, with a service level agreement of 99.9999999% achieved in terms of durability. Golub said Tardigrade makes use of erasure coding to make sure data is distributed in a highly resilient fashion.

Storj Labs compensates owners and data centers along with individuals with access to a lot of excess storage capacity for making capacity available, Golub said. Most storage drives are not anywhere near full capacity, which Golub noted has made it relatively easy for Storj Labs to amass 19PB of storage for its Tardigrade service. Each provider of storage capacity is required to pass a series of data stewardship tests for a period of time before being allowed to become a member of the Tardigrade service.

Storj Labs has also set up an open source partner program through which any open source project with a Tardigrade connector will receive a portion of the storage revenue generated by users of that software. That approach allows participants in projects to be partially compensated for their efforts as alternatives to cloud service providers, which routinely commercialize open source software without helping to fund its development, said Golub. Based on his previous experience as CEO of Docker Inc., he noted many open source projects die on the vine simply because the team that created it simply can’t afford to sustain it.

Interest in Tardigrade Decentralized Cloud Storage Service for certain use cases as an alternative to pubic clouds could be high, he said, given the fact that there has been no meaningful decline in cloud storage service pricing in the last three years. Use cases that should prove to be especially appealing include data protection and image retention. Storj Labs is also making available a library of bindings for Go, Android, C, .NET/Xamarin, Node.js, Swift and Python to make it easier for developers to invoke Tardigrade storage services as code.

It may be a while before IT organizations are completely comfortable with decentralized storage services as an alternative to public clouds. However, as the amount of data that needs to be stored continues to grow, every option available to store data may be needed soon.

— Mike Vizard

March 25, 2020
Why the Buzz on Software-Defined Everything (SDx)?
You’ve likely heard the buzz getting louder the last few years around software-defined everything (SDx). You’re probably finding a swarm of companies knocking on your door selling a host of services around implementing software-defined networking (SDN), software-defined storage (SDS) and software-defined data center (SDDC). What you may not realize is that this software-defined movement is truly a disruptive technology shift that is dramatically changing the way an organization accesses storage, networks and data centers.

The overarching mission of SDx is to break down the discrete IT silos (compute, storage and networking) by using software to bridge the technological and organizational gaps. By giving software systems a starring role in managing different kinds of hardware, the premise is that productivity will increase through more robust network access from both portable and traditional devices.

What are the true potential and outcomes of SDx that an IT administrator can tout to management? For starters, early adopters have reported being able to deliver significant cost savings and greater speed of delivery. They cite benefits such as decreased hardware costs, greater automation, more rapid deployment of IT resources and shorter timelines to implementation—to name the key ones.

Let’s take the traditional data center, where most organizations grapple with the high costs of ongoing management and maintenance of network switches, servers, storage devices and other hardware. Keeping these resources updated can be complex and expensive for an IT department. Moving to an SDDC, for example, can lower the total cost of ownership by reducing hardware costs (servers, racks, disk and tape, routers, etc.), and minimizing the data center size and the use of power, cooling and ongoing maintenance. With an SDDC, the IT department enjoys the benefits of a more simplified process that increases the speed of appropriating and provisioning networking. Software-automated provisioning can enable application deployment within minutes, for example.

Instead of the IT department being considered a hindrance, SDDC allows developers to create applications that are best for the business, instead of what works based on the hardware.

“Every technology organization needs to be able to transform ideas into working functionality that creates value for customers. That means you need not only world-class development processes but infrastructure processes as well—and that’s where software-defined data centers become absolutely relevant,” said Gene Kim, co-author of “The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win.”

The main elements of an SDDC include:
- A software implementation of a computer, which is called virtualization.
- An SDN where hardware and software resources are merged into a software-based virtual network.
- An SDS that includes storage virtualization.
- Automation software that allows an IT administrator to provision, control and manage all SDDCs components.
The second big driver of SDx adoption by IT departments is the increased agility they experience in responding to business demands. Much of this is made possible with SDS, which is an innovative way to restructure your infrastructure by separating hardware from software, and using software in place of disks and networking devices. SDS uses standard servers to manage storage requests by virtualizing your physical storage. This gives you more control over where and how data is stored.

Some of the key benefits of SDS over traditional storage include:
- Automatic storage management capabilities reduce the number of manual tasks for your storage administrators. They adapt to different needs without any human oversight or new hardware requirements.
- Flexibility to increase your storage requirements while decreasing the capacity of your existing hardware.
- Lower costs since SDS solutions run on standard hardware, and the automation reduces the number of administrators required.
- More scalability options, depending on your business requirements, by adding extra storage arrays or including additional CPUs and memory.
As business requirements continue to increase in speed and number, forward-thinking IT departments are moving away from hardware commitments and rigid architectures that constrict their ability to react and adjust to changing needs. Software-defined technologies are becoming the innovative powerhouses behind building more efficient and agile IT services for today and well into the future.

— Melinda Cross
March 25, 2020
Cato Networks Offers Instant SD-WAN Service

Cato Networks has added an instant-on capability to its software-defined wide area network service (SD-WAN) service to make it easier for IT teams to provide employees with remote access to applications.

Dave Greenfield, technology evangelist for Cato Networks, said rather than having to configure and install a virtual private network (VPN) client on every device to access applications, IT teams can simply share a URL to provide network access via a single sign-on protocol without requiring client software. At a time when many IT teams are scrambling to allow every employee to work at home to help combat the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, the Cato Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) service provides an alternative approach to achieve that goal at scale, he said.

The Cato SDP network is an instance of a global SD-WAN service co-managed by Cato Networks. IT teams still control who gains access to what applications using multifactor authentication, while Cato Networks manages the underlying network and security infrastructure, including all the firewalls and endpoint protection software. As such, Greenfield said, Cato SDP is one of the first instances of a service based on what Gartner is now describing as a secure access service edge (SASE) architecture.

Greenfield said trying to scale access using legacy VPN software is problematic because it requires IT teams to acquire more software licenses and bandwidth, while end users are provided with passwords to access the corporate network, which can be easily hacked. And, perhaps most problematic, most VPNs limit the number of simultaneous users allowed on the network.

Cato SDP provides access to a zero trust network environment that only provides access to applications that end users have been specifically authorized to use, said Greenfield, noting all of that can be accomplished in as little as 10 minutes.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, Greenfield said Cato Networks has seen a sharp increase in usage of its global network, which consists of points-of-presence residing in third-party data centers distributed around the world. This setup makes it possible to optimize application experiences based on where end users are physically accessing the internet.

It may be a few months to as long as two years before the COVID-19 pandemic subsides. What today may be viewed as a singular disruptive event could very well be a harbinger for how organizations will need to work from now on. Even once IT teams get everyone in their organization up and running from home, many of them will have to ask themselves how long they are prepared to manage IT as a remote service. The emergence of SASE-based services provides an alternative co-managed approach that allows IT teams to rely on an external service provider without having to give up control over their applications to a managed service provider (MSP).

Naturally, it may be a while before the current crisis subsides enough for organizations to realize they may need to fundamentally change the way they consume IT. The only thing that is for certain right now is that conversation is all but inevitable.

— Mike Vizard

March 23, 2020
Taking the Fear Out of Legacy Modernization

Once a cutting edge and golden standard of technology, legacy-based monolithic applications have become a big burden for many organizations. While pivotal in supporting business functions, they have and will continue to lose the flexibility and overall usability required to be successful in today’s competitive digital and agile business landscape.

But for most businesses, and especially the Fortune 1000s, looking to streamline their services and improve overall functionality, the prospect of breaking away from these systems is often seen as a double-edged sword. Ridding themselves of brittle, complex and tightly integrated technology, on one hand, can provide the right environment to introduce newer software. This can help elevate their businesses to be nimbler, more innovative and productive, ultimately driving better experiences and increased revenue. On the other hand, though, maintaining them can be viewed as the safer option that doesn’t include the fear of lost business intelligence, downtime for consumers and the biggest of all, an exorbitant cost that they simply can’t justify.

What’s important for them to realize is these modernization efforts don’t always require a complete overhaul or significant downtime to operations from rearchitecting or reengineering their applications. In fact, any organization in need of change can choose from a variety of alternative modernization processes that best suit their needs.

Below is a closer look at those opportunities and success stories from BBVA, Companies House and MTA after implementation.

Automated Conversion

With many large financial institutions, for instance, they are often running mission-critical applications and processes on their legacy systems that reduce their ability to meet the demand of modern business processes. As they look to reduce costs, enable data and business process integration to better navigate an increasingly global banking landscape, legacy modernization is top of mind. To make necessary changes and continue business as usual, one of the best strategies could be automated conversion.

By utilizing the necessary tools, an organization can produce a revitalized version of their legacy system in a new environment in a modern code, such as Java or C#. Through this process, once an application and/or database is translated, developers are uniquely positioned to maintain business logic from their legacy system while extending application functionality and enabling enhanced integration capabilities for target databases. Because this approach is software-based, this modernization strategy is significantly less costly and can be completed in steps to minimize any interruption to business.

In the case of BBVA, the second largest bank in Spain that operates in over 40 countries, the organization needed to reduce licensing costs of its mainframe and enhance its features, simultaneously freeing data trapped within its legacy system to enable these global operations. By pursuing an automated conversion to its systems, the bank was able to convert its code while taking total technical inventory, identifying key risk factors in its mainframe and ultimately removing significant amounts of dead code and approximately 38% of its programs.

As a result of the reduced cost of its mainframe operations, the company achieved positive ROI of their transformation strategy within two years.

Data Replication

Fully rewriting applications can be time consuming, costly and risky, with the potential loss of vital information and processes. An alternative option to keep the legacy system fully intact while freeing essential data from its mainframe is data replication.

Data replication allows an organization to replicate its mainframe and non-relational data through an entirely new, relational model. This allows the legacy system to continue with its standard functions, but automatically copy and convert data to the new model with a full replica of the legacy database, enabling greater visibility and flexibility for a business.

This process was especially effective for Companies House, Britain’s government bureau that records and stores information on the country’s 1.8 million unique companies. Since the organization requires daily data updates because of the need for public access to this information, the organization couldn’t afford any downtime while modernizing. By replicating its data onto a relational model, the company was not only able to more seamlessly integrate its code into its target database, but more easily manage daily updates to its data–ultimately resulting in faster service for consumers and significantly reduced costs for the company.

Batch Offloading

Many legacy systems remain fully intact today because of their incredible ability to process vast amounts of data in a reliable and effective fashion. That said, as the amount of information within the system grows, so do the costs of maintaining these systems. For organizations with limited IT budgets and resources, the ideal approach lies in batch offloading.

Batch offloading is often an easy first step in a modernization effort. This process requires an organization to convert one or more batch process applications to modern programming languages. By moving some of these processes off of the mainframe, organizations can future-proof their processes, maintain greater flexibility and reduce costs. These savings can also trickle down to the consumer, giving these organizations an edge against their competitors.

For New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the organization aimed to move critical applications off its legacy mainframe to make way for refreshed, cost-effective platforms. By undertaking the batch offloading strategy, the MTA continued without any interruption or significant changes to its mainframe’s processes for users. The organization was able to reduce the costs from maintaining its legacy system and prepare for the next steps in its broader modernization strategy.

Choosing the Right Approach

A business doesn’t have to be a member of the Fortune 1000 in order to successfully execute a modernization project like one. By developing a strong understanding of the functions of current systems, the risks associated with maintaining it, organizational needs and a realistic timeline for transformation efforts, a company can uniquely position itself to make significant changes to operations without interruptions to business.

While this transition is a significant undertaking for any organization, it’s up to them to identify the best modernization strategy for its goals in order to reduce costs, improve the customer experience and future-proof their processes to achieve overall success.

— Cameron Jenkins

March 18, 2020
Survey Finds More Data Disruption Occurring
A global survey of 1,000 IT decision-makers with more than 250 employees conducted by Dell Technologies finds on average organizations managed 13.53 petabytes (PB) of data in 2019, a nearly 40% increase since 2018.

The same survey also finds that as the amount of data has increased, so, too, has the cost of downtime. Those costs increased by 54% in the same period, resulting in an estimated total cost of $810,018 in 2019.

The survey also notes 82% of respondents suffered a disruptive event in the last 12 months, with the total cost of a data loss now on average exceeding $1 million.

Not surprisingly, the survey finds that a lot of the data that organizations are trying to protect resides in the cloud, thanks mainly to the rise of a variety of application use cases. The top five areas of investment cited by survey respondents include cloud-native applications (58%), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) (53%), software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications (51%), 5G and cloud edge infrastructure (49%), and Internet of Things/endpoints (36%).

Nearly, three-quarters of respondents (71%) noted these emerging technologies create more data protection complexity and 61% said they increase risks. The survey also finds 81% of respondents said their existing data protection solutions will not be able to meet all future business challenges.

Specific areas where existing data protection platforms are expected to fall short include being able to recover data after a cyberattack (69%), recover data from a data loss incident (64%), comply with regional data governance regulations (62%), and meeting backup and recovery service level objectives (62%).

Among organizations that have adopted these emerging technologies the percentage of organizations struggling with adequately protecting data is as follows:
- 5G and cloud edge infrastructure (67%)
- AI and ML platforms (64%)
- Cloud-native applications (60%)
- IoT and endpoint (59%)
- Robotic process automation (56%)
The survey also finds organizations prefer public cloud/SaaS (43%), hybrid cloud (42%) and private cloud (39%) as deployment environments for new applications. In the case of edge computing deployments, 62% cited private clouds as being the platform that will be relied on most to protect data.

Bob Ganley, senior marketing consultant for cloud at Dell EMC, said the biggest challenge for organizations will be finding a way to centrally manage backup and recovery across multiple cloud computing platforms. Those platforms inevitably will span multiple types of public and private clouds accessed as a service and deployed in local data centers. Most organizations are relying on a “mash-up” approach to cloud computing where there is no unified control plane, so as they add each new cloud platform their total cost increases, he said Ganley, noting it’s now only a matter of time before IT organizations start to centralize the management of those multiple clouds to rein in those costs.

It’s not clear to what degree that centralization effort will revolve around IT automation enabled by application programming interfaces (APIs) and best DevOps processes versus traditional data protection tools based on graphical user interfaces (GUIs). However, given the amount of data involved, it is more than likely that existing approaches to data protection are not going to scale, so a fundamental change in how backup and recovery is managed is now all but inevitable.

— Mike Vizard
March 16, 2020
Catchpoint Provides Free Remote Monitoring Tools to Help Combat COVID-19 Pandemic

Catchpoint announced today it will provide free access to tools to monitor remote network connections to help organizations that are helping to combat the COVID-19 virus by requiring employees to work from home.

Company CEO Mehdi Daoudi said supporting an entire workforce that suddenly needs to work remotely is clearly a major IT challenge. To enable IT teams to cope with that transition, Catchpoint is providing access to free tools that monitor access to software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications using agent software installed on endpoints. The company also makes available a browser extension through which remote users can discover instantly what is slowing down application performance, which they can then share with their IT support teams.

Catchpoint is also making available an Enterprise Digital Experience Monitoring for free for 90 days to IT organizations that want to more proactively monitor application experience. That service is based on a Global Monitoring Network that consists of 825 worldwide locations through which Catchpoint monitors network traffic flows.

With large numbers of workers accessing applications remotely, many IT teams are about to discover how intermittent network access from home can be. Not all neighborhoods and residences have access to the same levels of network bandwidth. With more workers trying to access backend network services remotely—some with children who are home from school because of COVID-19—the probability of connectivity issues is high for the next several months. In addition, Daoudi noted the need to have employees working from home could go on for as long as three to six months, which means many employees may decide to relocate to other places, such as summer residences, where connectivity is not as robust as their primary home service.

Rather than viewing the virus outbreak as roughly the equivalent of an extended snowstorm, IT teams would be well-advised to make sure critical employees have access to multiple networks. In some cases, that may mean providing employees with multiple wireless access cards for different networks in case the services provided by one carrier become overly taxed or simply inaccessible. Daoudi said Catchpoint is already seeing divergent levels of network performance between carriers operating in the same geographic regions.

At the same time, IT teams that operate in highly regulated industries may want to make sure employees are not inadvertently making use of their neighbor’s wireless network—or, potentially worse, accessing applications over a wireless network provided by their local café.

It’s too early to say with any certainty just how fragile network services in the months ahead may become. What is clear is providing network bandwidth and making certain those connections are secure requires a lot of planning on the part of internal IT teams. In some localities, there is still time to put those contingency plans in place. Elsewhere, employees are already being told to work from home by local and state officials.

Whatever the outcome, the dependency organizations have on IT and IT professionals is about to become more apparent than ever.

— Mike Vizard

March 12, 2020
HPE Leverages AI for Remote Server Management

The latest ProLiant MicroServer is designed to use AI to provide the next generation remote server management

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced an HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus platform designed to be managed remotely using advanced algorithms the company makes available via the cloud.

Tim Peters, vice president and general manager for global small-to-medium businesses and the midmarket at HPE, said the goal is to make it possible for organizations of all sizes to take advantage of artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to automate the management of servers in remote offices.

Based on Intel Pentium and Intel Xeon processors and weighing less than 10 pounds, the HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus comes with HPE Integrated Lights Out 5 (iLO5) server management tool that enables IT teams to configure, monitor and update servers remotely. Those servers can then also be connected back HPE InfoSight for Servers, a cloud-based AI tool that HPE is making available for the first time on this class of servers, said Peters.

HPE is making this class of servers available as part of a subscription service option that makes the HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus available starting at just less than $20 per month for organizations that prefer to treat IT as an operational expense. This latest generation of HPE servers also only generates 36dB of sound so most employees in a remote office may not even be aware of its existence.

In addition, Peters noted the HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus server also supports HPE’s silicon-based root of trust technology, which prevents servers in remote offices from being tampered with when there is no IT staff available at that location.

The days when most organizations could afford to have IT staff at each remote office are all but over. IT organizations increasingly need to rely on frameworks that allow them to centrally manage IT infrastructure wherever it’s deployed. IT teams can either build and deploy those IT automation frameworks themselves or they can rely on the frameworks that IT vendors are embedding in their latest generation of systems. Naturally, that latter approach requires IT to replace their existing IT infrastructure. However, given the rate at which applications are being deployed and upgraded, many organizations are now finding they are replacing server infrastructure more frequently.

Regardless of the approach, overworked IT staffs don’t want to have to send someone to a remote office location unless it’s absolutely required. Beyond the cost of the travel, there’s the time that could be better spent on more pressing IT management tasks to consider.

Of course, anything involving AI is likely to make IT administrators nervous. However, as IT becomes more complex, it’s not likely IT teams will be replaced. Rather, the focus of IT teams will shift toward other areas that add more value to the business as more rote tasks increasingly are automated.

Naturally, it may be a while before all the legacy infrastructure installed is replaced, so IT teams may still need to travel to remote offices for some additional period of time. However, the days when IT teams racked up frequent flyer miles because of the need to visit remote office locations will soon be a distant memory.

— Mike Vizard

March 11, 2020
ServiceNow Embraces AI to Manage IT

ServiceNow has taken the wraps off the Orlando update to its cloud platform for managing IT that adds advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

In addition, an existing integration framework that enables the Now Platform from ServiceNow to manage DevOps pipelines created by third-party platforms is now part of the core platform. Previously, that capability was only available as an add-on that could be downloaded from the ServiceNow online store.

Pablo Stern, senior vice president of IT workflows for ServiceNow, said that as ITIL-based frameworks and DevOps continue to converge it is apparent IT teams will also need to rely more on AI to manage IT environments that are becoming increasingly more complex.

The Now Intelligence capabilities being embedded into the Now Platform will address that issue by surfacing insights and making recommendations to predict and resolve issues before they become a major problem, he said.

IT teams can also take advantage of “always-on virtual agents” to track and automatically initiate specific workflows.
Analytics capabilities provided by Now Intelligence also include recommendations on how to optimize usage of cloud assets based on the billing options available and the ability to asses risks to the business. That latter capability includes vulnerability assessments of software and hardware that can be used to automatically trigger a remediation process.

ServiceNow has also enhanced its support for mobile computing platforms and added Agent Affinity for Work Assignment, which allows IT teams to assign work to agents that have the most expertise dealing with a specific issue or familiarity with certain end users.

In general. Stern said IT organizations would be well-advised to starting walking back many of the biases that now exist among advocates of DevOps and legacy ITIL-based approaches to managing IT. Both approaches are equally relevant depending on the task at hand. The challenge now is providing access to a common pool of data that informs those processes, he said.

There’s no doubt that ITIL and DevOps frameworks will continue to evolve side-by-side for many years to come. In fact, the latest iteration of the ITIL framework borrows many of the concepts for adroitly managing IT infrastructure from best practices that were pioneered by DevOps practitioners. The balance that needs to be struck is finding a way to respond faster to rapidly changing application and business conditions without sacrificing a structured approach to managing IT that makes it possible to consistently scale systems that are highly resilient.

Naturally, it may be a while before that balance is struck. However, AI will play a critical role in enabling organizations to achieve that goal. Given the complexity of modern IT environments, it’s simply not possible to effectively manage IT by relying on manual processes or custom scripts that don’t scale. AI is not likely to replace the need for human IT expertise anytime soon, but it will go a long way to maximizing what is already an overtaxed resource often subject to more fallibility than anyone cares to admit.

— Mike Vizard

March 11, 2020