IT infrastructure is mission-critical to the success of an organization. Yet, increasing demands from business, coupled with stagnant budgets have resulted in constant pressure on the CIO to improve productivity in a cost-effective manner.

Most traditional models manage IT Operations through manpower and static tools. This accounts for approximately 40+%, the largest expense in managed services. As long as organizations are tied up with such linear models they will continue to face operational challenges and administrative overheads.

Complexity of IT environments is increasing every day and manual efficiency is unable to match pace - establishing a strong case for automation. There is a need for next generation automation tools that make it easy to nurture, sustain and grow IT support infrastructure while maintaining an organization’s business edge.

Over the last 40 years, the data center has undergone significant changes. Today’s IT infrastructure is the outcome of several years of evolution in computing platforms as depicted below:

With increased adoption of cloud-centric consumption based models, traditional models are losing value. Customers now care less about technology and more about making IT work on demand, and these models help reduce both costs and risks.

Customer needs require service providers to move to Infrastructure-as-a-Utility phase (Phase 5) that provides a service-centric approach with aligned delivery capabilities. However, this transition can introduce significant change and complexity at a time when data centers are already overburdened and understaffed. At the same time, ensuring near-perfect uptime of the IT infrastructure is an imperative. According to a Ponemon Institute study, an outage can cost an organization an average of about $5,000 per minute!

CIOs are grappling with the inability of existing infrastructure to keep up with increasing demands from business and outdated IT processes that are incapable of exploiting new technologies. To provide the necessary flexibility, reduce the high costs created by IT sprawl and shift resources away from routine maintenance towards innovation and strategic initiatives, the CIO must change the model through which IT infrastructure services are delivered.

Automation and analytics are the weapons in a CIOs arsenal that can enable the shift to the future state of IT infrastructure services transforming the data center into a strategic business asset. Analytics based insights can potentially reduce technology infrastructure expenses by up to 40%.Automated self-healing, self-service, and predictive analytics solutions can improve availability, free up resources from performing reactive management tasks and boost productivity.

It remains to be seen if the CIOs can harness the capabilities of these tools to drive organizational profitability. What do you think? Please do write in to express your views.

Ramkumar Balasubramanian - GM, Practice & Automation, Wipro, Ltd.

Ramkumar Balasubramanian is the General Manager - Practice & Automation, with Managed Services, Global Infrastructure Division in Wipro. Managed Services is the services arm of Wipro, focusing on providing Infrastructure Management Services. As part of his role he is responsible for conceptualization of innovative services and to take these services to the market.

Ramkumar has overall experience of 22 years in the industry and has been with Wipro for last 10 years. Prior to his tenure at Wipro Infotech, Ramkumar has worked with HP as a lead architect for the HP Worldwide Catalog Management project based out of the US. Ramkumar has also worked with three startup companies designing products and have filed patents on the same.

Ramkumar holds a degree MS from Madurai Kamaraj University.