IT data management now a major enterprise initiative
Evolving requirements for leveraging IT information have led to the emergence of IT data management (ITDM) as a major enterprise initiative, according to LogLogic.
They also assert that ITDM is key to addressing the three cornerstones of the modern, intelligence-driven enterprise – dedicated security threat management, comprehensive data for compliance, and enterprise-wide operational intelligence. This assertion is reinforced by research conducted jointly with industry analyst firm, Forrester Research.
“Our research illustrates that better decision-making and improved productivity are the major reasons these executives are looking to leverage IT data,” said John Kindervag, senior analyst for Forrester. “As IT systems become more and more complex, there will be an increased demand to improve the way in which we define IT metrics and use that data to make important, and sometimes costly, decisions. Companies need better ways to do change control and schedule downtime. They need deeper understanding of how resources are being used. They need better data to leverage for capacity planning exercises.”
IT data management is the collection and reporting on actionable data helping enterprises propel growth, manage their IT assets and ensure security. ITDM expands beyond traditional Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), which remains an effective tool for optimizing security threat identification. However, SIEM does not adequately address the scope of compliance or operational intelligence in the dynamic enterprise.
Using the near-real-time availability of a comprehensive management dashboard for all business-critical operations, ITDM helps enterprises provide forensic information to aid in security threat identification and management, as well as corporate compliance, while enabling enterprises to make intelligence-based decisions based on the growing mass of IT-based information available to them.
“It is common knowledge that over 30 percent of enterprise data today is IT data, or data about the enterprise’s information technology,” said Guy Churchward, CEO of LogLogic. “Complicating matters, that information is scattered across multiple locations, both on-premise and in the cloud. It is difficult to access because of multiple, incompatible interfaces, and it is difficult to correlate without greater context.”
IT data management is unique in allowing data collection from systems scattered throughout the enterprise, comprehensive reporting on that data, and broad-based analysis of the data. Those three data touchpoints are critical because many analytic systems in the enterprise “feed on” IT data. Those include IT operations management; security event management; IT governance, risk management, and compliance; service level agreement (SLA) management; and a range of third-party applications.
IT data management is the only technology with the scope to access, correlate and present that data to all enterprise applications that require it.
An April 2011 report by Forrester Research cites a “proliferation of tools used to collect and manage this data” in the enterprise, and the need for IT decision-makers to adopt data analytics tools that move beyond legacy technologies. The report identifies three compelling motivators:
- Executives are demanding more data insight
- All levels of the organisation need IT data analytics capabilities
- Unstructured data is stretching into all IT departments.
Forrester further notes that today there is no efficient way for IT departments to gather and analyse disparate data from across the enterprise. Continuing, it says that vendors “will be compelled by market forces to expand their offering and provide an avenue for the collection, aggregation, analysis, and reporting on any type of IT data” – which are the cornerstones of the emerging IT data management class of tools.