Over time we have seen how the Operations Centre has had to evolve in order to understand and support the adoption of different infrastructures, technologies and architectural changes required within a growing organisation to remain competitive.

From integrating an enterprise service bus to developing a service orientated architecture, iMonitor, has worked with many organisations across the globe and the persistent key focus has always been achieving better efficiencies and reducing costs whilst increasing the mean time between failures. In more recent times we have seen the adoption of new practices like DevOps to ensure companies are continually innovating and developing new products and features as your markets demand.

Considerations for Creating an Integrated Operations Centre

Approximately 80% of organizations with a security operations centre (SOC) have a network operations centre (NOC). Even though both these teams primarily perform different functions within a business, there can be significant overlaps which are becoming even greater as technology advances. Therefore we are seeing the SOCs and NOCs collaborating more and more – especially during an incident or emergency. However, by looking at integrating the SOC & NOC, organisations can typically achieve over a 60% TCO reduction and also ensure they are proactive and not reactive!

Both NOCs and have incident response teams, call centres and monitoring/event management solutions. Both are tasked with preserving the integrity and availability of enterprise IT assets. Given this objective it makes sense for organisations to consider integrating their NOC and SOC into an integrated operations centre, or an IOC.

A properly constructed IOC creates cohesion on three different levels:

  • Organizational: cross-correlating, pattern identification from shared NOC/SOC monitoring tools, triage and collaboration
  • System: standard operating procedures, process integration and service level agreements (SLAs)
  • Asset: shared use of a common information aggregator that collects all of the pertinent network monitoring data and logs and distributes it through integrated tools and dashboards

The Total Cost of Ownership Conundrum

“Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of enterprises will shut down their traditional data centers.”

Balancing costs in relation to capital expenditure and operational expense is a business imperative for most companies. But how easy is it to really ascertain the right level of investment needed to maintain the status quo as well as delivering business benefit whilst ensuring customer retention?

The 21st century has seen new vendors emerge with disruptive technologies that have taken market share from large global organisations in a way we would have thought unthinkable just a few short years ago. We’ve gone from autonomic computing to Predictive Analytics where systems can be programmed to recognise threats or performance issues before they impact the service delivery or the user experience. The renaissance of AI (Artificial Intelligence) combined with today’s computing power is being integrated into the fabric of the modern infrastructure, offering the ability to detect, isolate and remediate within a split second.

Faced with a myriad of questions, how do you choose whether any solution is on-premises, in the cloud on multi-clouds or deployed via a hybrid model? Keeping in mind the mandatory requirement to have effective security, management and performance visibility of the application or solution and ensuring it meets certain regulations and compliance.

The Vendor Selection Dilemma

“Pick your partners wisely, as they will play a large role in helping to evolve and scale your organization’s’ infrastructure moving forward. Avoid surrounding yourself with a B team,”. The critical time frame for this trend is 2020 to 2023. Gartner

iMonitor recognises that merely providing a product or providing most organisations with a long-term solution to only some of their business challenges, wont suffice.

Our customers are looking for a partner that invests the time to build a relationship that ensures their unique situations are understood and that any solution will integrate seamlessly into their current environment and build upon their current investments.

iMonitor’s focus is in creating trust with our clients. We do this through our tried and tested methodology that showcases our skills and knowledge, allowing us to build long and successful partnerships, delivering a reduced time to value for our clients.

  1. Most of our engagements start with a Design Thinking or a specific Project Definition Workshop
  2. We spend time understanding our client’s specific environment so that we can create an Architecture and Topology view
  3. We work with our clients to prioritise and Define any Technological improvements
  4. Understanding a customer’s Consumption Preference is critical – be it an outright purchase or monthly service charge.
  5. Lastly we have the flexibility to work as part of our clients team or to take complete ownership of the solution or service, always ensuring a suitable SLA is in place.

Explore the iMonitor Solution

With our deep knowledge and expertise, we have created a best of breed solution that integrates SOC (Security Operations Centre) and NOC (Network Operations Centre) into a single cloud offering, providing our clients with greater efficiencies that culminate in a reduced total cost of ownership.

To find out more, we have created a series of webinars that will go into more detail about our solution offerings and challenges that you may be facing.

Join us from the 24th of September as iMonitor and business leaders discuss what organisations really need to be thinking about and the changes required within their organisational structure to position themselves to really reap the rewards of a unified AI led infrastructure that can truly avoid any degradation in performance or impact the user experience.

Click here to register.

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visit our website at www.imonitor.ai

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

iMonitor UK Limited

Anthony Nartey is the Founder and CEO of iMonitor.

He is known as a thought leader and trusted advisor within the IT industry and sits on various advisory councils, including with IBM. A high impact executive with success in building and transforming companies working across multiple industry sectors and international markets.