Multivendor enterprise IT environments don’t spring up overnight. They evolve over time. Organizations cobble them together by combining sequences of usually unrelated events – everything from acquisitions to investments in best-of-breed components to leadership changes that shift tactics regarding vendor preferences.
IT leaders: Where do they go from here? Sometimes, IT leaders are overwhelmed.
Managers are faced with vendor sprawl as IT environments grow. It’s not uncommon for individual departments to house several vendors’ compute, storage, and network platforms under one roof. Connect those platforms to dozens of vendors’ satellite components and software packages, and replicate the matrix across divisions and geographies, and you have one complicated mix of IT issues to manage.
How can IT leaders manage all of this complexity? They have two options. They can handle it themselves – keeping up with all the service contracts, vendor communications, maintenance tasks, and troubleshooting. They can also hire a third party who will manage multivendor support.
Both sides have their own arguments. Organizations that want to keep tight control over IT and are confident in staff’s ability to coordinate many often-challenging vendor relationships may want to try keeping the task in house. Multivendor support is a good option for those who want to concentrate on core competencies and leave vendor relations to specialists.
These key factors are important for IT leaders who want to manage complex multivendor IT environments.
How well do they know their environment?
In other words, what’s running where? Which vendor supplied a specific router that controls traffic to the organization’s northeast region? What type of support is available? Who can they contact to fix it?
An overwhelming percentage of IT managers today don’t have a good understanding of their organization’s assets. It may be because the organization hasn’t developed a comprehensive set of asset management resources. IT might not be keeping it current. Regardless, IT leaders need to be able to identify everything in their environments – what it is, what it connects to, who supplied it, and what can be done quickly to remediate a problem.
In a multivendor environment, it can be dangerous to lack of insight. IT must explain the cause of any network problem found in a compliance audit. If a network analysis shows that an old instance of Windows XP still has nodes in a foreign country where the organization doesn’t even have operations, IT should shut the instance down.
What are your greatest downtime risks?
This is a question organizations should be asking no matter what equipment they’re using. It is a mission-critical piece that can save the company’s life. But it’s even more important in a multivendor environment. Leaders need to understand the dependencies of a payment system, key database, and other vendor platforms to ensure that they can manage outages. As risk management plans evolve, SLAs must be updated.
Do their SLAs include the service levels they require?
SLAs need to be closely managed in multivendor environments. If you’re working with multiple support vendors, each one will have a different support approach. SLAs may change, and each one will have a different escalation procedure. An enterprise may have a 24-by-7, 4-hour response maintenance contract for its servers, but only a next business day contract for networks. This can cause network issues to render the server response coverage ineffective. The lowest-level SLA will limit operations.
Are their teams up to it?
The pace of change in IT has increased dramatically over the past few years. It’s no longer driven by hardware technology, which had a predictable life cycle to it. Software is driving this rate of change more than hardware technology. This puts pressure on IT staffs to stay up to date with complex modern technology practices – in software, containers, orchestration system, and resource management systems – that are all evolving at incredible rates. Add to this the challenges of keeping up with the knowledge levels on each vendor platform, and IT departments quickly find themselves in crisis.
It’s best to assess the skills-based needs of the business and deal with them proactively. This could involve additional training for staff members on key vendor technologies. If too many platforms require coverage, it might also mean that the maintenance responsibilities are transferred to an outside provider who has experience.
Can you see the whole thing?
The biggest challenge in multivendor environments lies in identifying the source of an outage and getting the responsible party to address it promptly. An outage could appear to be a server issue at first glance. But IT environments can be so large and complex, and full of dependencies, that an outage could be caused due to a component attached to a server platform. Many times, pointing fingers is what happens when one vendor representative calls. Vendors, after all, are unfamiliar with each other’s products, reluctant to talk to each other, and reluctant to assume responsibility for resolving a case.
IT leaders trying to manage a multivendor environment need to see the environment as a holistic system – not a collection of components. This will require knowledge about the systems, vendors, overlap SLAs, and the resources needed to resolve an issue.
The Bottom Line
Leaders face increasing complexity as IT environments expand. It is possible. It will require energy and organization to guide the effort internally. This is especially true with the rapid explosion of “Edge Computing” and “Edge Data.”
Critical information can now easily be stored and manipulated in many more locations and configurations that ever before. Some organizations are turning to outside services providers for assistance. It is important to understand the provider’s technical and geographic scope in order to provide consistent service across all platforms and locations where assets may be deployed. IT can focus more on positive business outcomes by focusing less on managing a complex web of vendor relationships.
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