Multivendor enterprise IT environments don’t spring up overnight. They tend to 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 face vendor sprawl issues as their IT environments expand. 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 this complexity? There are two options. They can handle it themselves – keeping up with all the service contracts, vendor communications, maintenance tasks, and troubleshooting. They can also call in a third party to handle 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 really understand their environments?
In other words, what’s running where? Which vendor supplied a specific router that controls traffic to the organization’s northeast region? What support is offered for this product? 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 up-to-date. 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.
A lack of insight in a multivendor environment could prove disastrous. IT will need to explain why a compliance audit uncovers a problem in a network path. 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. The ability to accept risk is a critical piece of information that can save a business. 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.
Are their SLAs adequate to provide the required service levels for their business
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 can change and each support vendor will use a different escalation method. 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. Operation will be limited by the lowest-level SLA.
Are their teams up for the challenge?
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. This rate of change is now driven more by software. 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 maintaining knowledge levels on all the vendor platforms and IT departments quickly find themselves in a skills crisis.
It’s best to assess the skills-based needs of the business and deal with them proactively. This could include training staff on key vendor technologies, or if there are too many platforms that need coverage, moving the maintenance responsibilities to an external provider with experience.
Can you see all of it?
Multivendor environments present a challenge in that it is difficult to determine the cause of an issue and get the responsible party to fix it quickly. An outage could appear to be a server issue at first glance. IT environments can be so large and complex, and full of dependencies, that an outage could result from 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 of the systems and vendors as well as the overlap SLAs and the resources required for resolving an issue.
The Bottom Line
As IT environments grow, leaders face increased complexity. It’s possible. It will take energy and organization to manage the internal effort. This is especially true with the rapid explosion of “Edge Computing” and “Edge Data.”
Critical information can now be stored and manipulated in a variety of locations and configurations than ever before. Some organizations turn to outside service providers to help. To provide consistent services across multiple platforms and locations, it is crucial to assess the provider’s technical depth and geographic coverage. IT can be freed up to concentrate on delivering positive business outcomes rather than managing a complicated web of vendor relationships.
For more information, Click here.
