IT departments increasingly find themselves asked to do more, yet with fewer resources and reduced operating budgets. IT professionals may also experience enormous pressure from the business to respond quickly and deliver more solutions than ever before.
The pressure inherent to the modern IT environment can leave companies vulnerable to risks including service outages, delays in new service offerings, and solutions that don’t satisfy business requirements. At the root of the issue are the multiple departments managing various IT functions, often using different tools. Departments may be forced to reach over one another, since they are managing the same servers, databases, and applications.
Complicated service management makes performing service infrastructure changes difficult – and sometimes even noncompliant. BMC BladeLogic removes the confusion and simplifies service infrastructure change management.
At its core, BMC provides businesses with a unified architecture, designed to manage service infrastructure changes driven by policies. BMC technologies lay the foundation to automate network configuration, server, and database changes while achieving enterprise governance and compliance.
These features alone provide companies tremendous value; however, you can extend the capabilities of your BMC BladeLogic implementation. Here are a few examples:
- Network Discovery: Automatically discover the devices whose configurations you’re going to manage. Setting a clear precedence for device management helps create comprehensive policies that govern changes within the environment.
- Service Topology: Once managed devices are identified, mapping them into service models allows team members the ability to determine potential impacts prior to making changes.
- Drive Policies: It’s essential to document policies in order to completely understand the compliance requirements. For instance, a policy may dictate specific configuration rules that you are required to audit against. When you identify policy violations or discrepancies, it’s necessary to document those incidents. BMC technologies can be used to create automatic jobs that remediate violations and deliver them to the change request approval process. All of this ensures your BMC BladeLogic system is optimized to deliver changes based on concrete policies.
Utilizing BMC technologies as mentioned above, coupled with targeted BMC consulting assistance, creates a solid foundation for changes and automated deployments, within your company’s physical and virtual environments. These capabilities ensure your implementation accelerates time-to-value, improves service deployment, and reduces risks and costs.
These capabilities also allow you to develop a detailed roadmap for the operational evolution of your data center and manage change throughout the enterprise.
But to really get the most out of BladeLogic, organizations should consider working with a specialist who not only has expertise in the BladeLogic Automation Suite, but has cross-architectural specialization (i.e. capabilities across the various BMC technologies and other components) to leverage the best of the various interconnected elements for maximum advantage. This includes applying best practices and understanding a client’s standards, preferences, etc. Investing in BMC consulting expertise (insist on a demonstrable payback!) can make a profound difference.
Has your organization implemented BMC BladeLogic? Did you extend the capabilities of your BMC rollout? Share your tips and experience in the comments!
Get the Most Out of Your BMC BladeLogic Implementation was posted at Optimize IT. | http://www.datatrend.com/optimize-it