Business services management: IT's higher calling

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For many network executives, downtime is as dreaded as an Internal Revenue Service audit. They don't know how much damage will be done, how much it will cost or how much trouble they will be in when it's over. They just know to avoid it at all costs.

When the dreaded downtime does occur, IT shops often stray from established processes in their rush to get systems back up and running. They perform ad hoc fixes and, perhaps, focus on problems that could wait while leaving more pressing issues unattended. The latest network management buzz surrounds a new strategy for alleviating this madness.

The strategy, dubbed business services management (BSM), has given rise to the next generation of management tools. BSM tools are aimed at helping network executives prioritize IT projects and address their fixes based on policies that align IT with business goals, processes and services. With their management products already collecting volumes of data on network, system and application health and performance, vendors propose the next step is correlating network health with business performance. And that's the pitch for BSM.

This is software that lets IT executives tell their management software tools which IT applications, services and processes are the most important to the business. The software then, in theory, helps IT staff monitor and protect those business processes no matter where in the data center or extended enterprise those processes reside. Should an outage occur, BSM would help IT folks quickly restore the most critical systems first. Should performance issues threaten an important business system, BSM not only would alert IT folks, but would offer suggestions on how to fix the IT problem to meet business goals.

BSM can improve the performance of important IT systems, too, while being flexible enough to let network executives realign IT systems with business-oriented goals at any given time, proponents say. This differs from its predecessor, business impact management (BIM). BIM could react at the time of a performance problem or network failure to identify the affected applications, end users and customers. BSM, in contrast, is proactive. For example, BSM would alert IT staff to an over-utilized server, based on stored usage patterns, before a performance slowdown. It would allocate more server resources to support the applications, end users and customers before any performance issues occur. It also would provide the data that staff members need to better equip the network to keep business services up and running.

BSM means combining business and technical information into a logical whole that proves the value of IT, says Benoit Thibaut, head of the instrumentation team at DSIO Auchan, a supermarket chain in Lille, France.