In today’s modern era of fast-changing business and operational conditions, organizations need IT management resources that are resilient and can adapt to constant change. This objective is often summed up in one word: assurance. But the exact methodologies and IT investments to get there can vary. Regardless of how it’s approached, IT platform assurance is critical to navigating and managing the dynamic environments of modern enterprises operating at scale.
What is Assurance and Why is it Important?
IT management change comes in many forms – from adding new features, configuration adjustments and bug fixes, to system upgrades, software updates, patching, and more. The primary goal of IT change management is to carry out these activities with minimal disruption to IT services. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done in today’s demanding operational environments.
Modern challenges to IT assurance include the integration of rapidly evolving technologies like artificial intelligence, larger volumes of data, a more distributed workforce, stricter regulations for compliance, and the ever-increasing sophistication of cyber threats. To keep pace with each of these factors, IT management exists in a seemingly constant state of change, one that is becoming increasingly unexpected and disruptive.
This is where assurance becomes critical. System administrators and their teams must find ways to build assurance in the face of this constant change. They need operational tools that can bolster resilience by quickly identifying and comparing where changes are happening, and then confidently effecting rapid restoration. These tools must also account for the unprecedented amounts of data created and offer robust automation to uncover key insights at the speed of business. Without such capabilities, human analysis would significantly lengthen response times and increase error rates that impact service availability and lead to business losses.
The Recipe for Assurance
We use the term “bulletproof IT” to describe systems that have highly resilient audit, restore, and configuration backup capabilities to achieve assurance amid the pace and complexity of modern IT management change. The recipe for strong assurance includes several key attributes.
Systems must be capable of scheduling and capturing configurations on demand, with the capacity to securely back up and audit them. Assurance also requires adequate visibility into how network devices feed into mission-critical business services and correlate to performance. Ideally, there should also be the ability to automatically create, route, and enrich tickets with configuration change and diagnostic data for immediate insight into service-impacting changes. These insights, in turn, can drive deeper problem analysis and remediation efforts.
Device onboarding is another major factor in assurance. Systems should be able to automatically discover, populate, and monitor new network devices – including storing and enforcing baseline configurations for better governance, risk and compliance. Assurance is further achieved when an organization is able to streamline maintenance scheduling and asset tracking through customizable database fields.
The ScienceLogic Approach to Assurance
ScienceLogic has mastered all of the techniques and tools mentioned above, and we’re helping clients use them to implement new technologies, support AIOps maturity and progress on their journeys to Autonomic IT with confidence. We support hundreds of vendors with our ScienceLogic AI Platform assurance and Restorepoint network configuration change management solution, which centralizes network device management through automation to reduce downtime and increase productivity.
By automating device control and configuration changes, Restorepoint minimizes manual errors and saves valuable time. The platform enhances network security with automated, scheduled, and on-demand configuration backups – ensuring systems are always protected. And clients can instantly restore configurations across the entire network with a simple one-click recovery. This generates dramatic cost savings from reduced downtime and network outages; and auditing becomes seamless thanks to continuous visibility into network compliance status.
