Managing so many server tools from so many vendors deployed on thousands of servers, both legacy and virtual, is too complex, is too slow, and too costly. This can be fixed.
Fantasy Island
In a perfectly simplified world, the server management tools used by an enterprise IT department to ensure back-up, security and server health might come from a single vendor, cover every function, work on every type of server, support every type of environment, and can be managed via one platform. In this dreamland, every server would also be deployed with the same tool configurations set-up the same way, every time. But, we don’t live in this simplified fantasy dream-world. Instead, enterprise IT departments face the everyday reality of using many (sometimes competing) server management tools, for back-up, end-point security, server monitoring, and server analytics (just to name a few), whether internally developed, custom or from any vendor or open-source project.
The Problem
The result is that today IT departments have a complicated mix of server management software from different sources that all need to be configured, managed and maintained across their lifecycles on ever-growing numbers of different types of servers.
IT Operations: A Clear Target for Optimization
This makes IT Operations very complicated and presents an enormous opportunity cost. As you can seein the chart from IDC, server management costs are steadily increasing, while the cost of servers themselves is actually dropping. Every hour IT spends managing complexity is an hour that could be used to provide business value. But as I’m about to explain, although this is a complex problem, it has a very straightforward solution. So, let’s look at how we got to this point.
Complexity from Heterogeneous Systems and Fragmented Processes
Today’s enterprise IT environments are a mix of heterogeneous technologies and fragmented processes. This situation didn’t happen overnight. Across the years, IT departments have purchased the best technology for specific needs and requirements. Factor in a few mergers, re-orgs, and some off-shore computing, and the situation becomes even more complex. This has resulted in the accumulation of many (sometimes overlapping) software technologies operating across a variety of different server platforms. IT departments can’t throw away all this legacy technology. The software is working and the servers are paid for. Even if they wanted to, just the cost to exchange server management tools and vendors would be prohibitive and cause a lot of extra work. The adoption of new cloud based technologies further complicates the challenges IT faces today. However, today IT departments need to manage all these servers and to maintain all the different server-management software that these servers require.
What is IT Doing?
Organizations are currently doing their best to deal with these challenges, but not without huge sacrifices in productivity. They rely on a mish-mash of manual processes, templates, custom scripting and generic configuration software, because until now there hasn’t been a central and unifying platform to tie together management oversight across the lifecycle (from registration to patches and updates) for all server tools and for all servers.
The Solution
What organizations require is the ability to view the entire “stack” of server management software that is deployed on all servers; legacy, physical or virtual, on-prem, or on public infrastructure. Jetpatch software provides you with that single-pane-of-glass-view, unifying visibility and control over thousands of servers and all of your server management solutions from all of your vendors. Jetpatch’s out-of-the-box solution simplifies and modernizes the management of all your server management tools and services.
Quickly and easily automate the management of all IT tools throughout their entire lifecycle.
It provides a unified platform for IT Operations teams to automate the configuration and provisioning of server tools to servers. IT Operations, tools SME’s and Infrastructure teams can also centrally troubleshoot, upgrade, and decommission your server management tools. The full lifecycle of server management software can now be managed centrally. IT departments can migrate from maintaining a collection of complex scripts, multiple templates and manual ticketing processes to something simpler that automates processes and scales to meet service delivery SLAs. IT departments can use Jetpatch software to track the health and status of all server management tools, from all vendors, in a single repository. Operations teams can unify and automate workflow across IT Infrastructure and provide role-based access to key server KPIs for Application Owners. This might sound like fantasy, but it’s real and available today. Would you like to know more?
Next Steps: Contact us and see if Jetpatch can help automate the management of your organization’s IT tools throughout their entire lifecycle.
Learn how you can transform siloed, manually-intensive tools from different sources into an automated, unified set of systems management services – with no changes required to any tool.
