January 22, 2016

Savision Discusses Microsoft System Center, Live Maps Unity

By Jennifer Klostermann

Savision Discusses Hybrid Cloud

Savision, the first Dutch software company to sell to the US government via the GSA approval list, was founded in 2006 by two Dutch nationals, and today has a team of 35 people across Amsterdam, Dallas, New York, and Ottawa. An independent software provider selling enterprise software for the IT operations market, Savision currently focuses primarily on Microsoft technology but plans to extend operations across other platforms in the future. With a client base including the International Atomic Energy Agency, US Library of Congress, KPMG, and 20th Century Fox, the company has established itself firmly in both the hybrid cloud and Microsoft System Center markets. Matthew Carr, Savision’s Business Development Manager, with 15 years’ experience working in various IT&T companies around the world and having filled a range of positions in Savision from Finance to Business Intelligence, discusses the pros and cons of hybrid cloud with us, and delves into the advantages Microsoft System Center offers.

What do you believe are the chief benefits of moving to hybrid cloud?

Price, productivity, and security. Pricing because companies don’t need additional data room capacity for peak times of the day. If done correctly, the public cloud can be purchased on a per hour basis, meaning that bursting capacity will be considerably cheaper than managing more fixed assets.

Productivity is provided thanks to less time spent maintaining the IT environment which is partially handled by the public cloud providers now. Less time fixing problems affords more time for application development teams to focus on delivering value to the business. The counter argument to this, however, is that the increased complexity that the hybrid cloud introduces can mean that when issues do arise, time spent troubleshooting problems increases.

 

Furthermore, security is a contentious issue at the moment, but people are realizing that security protocols built by the public cloud providers are actually far more secure than simple company firewalls which are regularly being breached by the BYOD phenomenon. Data is actually safer within a hybrid cloud that uses best in class security.

Are there any organizations that you believe more likely to benefit from hybrid cloud?

Pretty much any organization with over 100 employees can start to think about the hybrid cloud. We are seeing now that early stage companies will start on the pure public cloud because of the simplicity it affords in allowing companies to focus on their core business. As companies mature though it will make sense to have critical workloads on their private cloud, and use public for more ancillary requirements.

Are there any organizations that you believe won’t benefit from hybrid cloud?

Some global governmental departments such as in Germany are legally required to keep all data on their own premises. Additionally, there is an ongoing saga of US law enforcement agencies attempting to track potential criminal activity via social media and data sources in the big US public cloud providers (Microsoft, Amazon, and Google) for data located overseas. Currently, the likes of Microsoft are rightfully attempting to block access to data held in other countries. Should this situation change, it may see a flight of non-US companies from the large public cloud providers.

What can Microsoft System Center do for organizations, and how do you make that solution even better?

Microsoft System Center is a suite of products that enterprises use to manage their IT infrastructure and applications. System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is an agent-based monitoring technology that tells an IT administrator when there is a problem or outage somewhere in the environment. Savision Live Maps Unity works natively with SCOM to provide business context to these infrastructure problems. Since 80% of incidents are non-critical and don’t affect the business in a meaningful way, Live Maps Unity enables organizations to focus only on the areas affected by outages and hence save time on problem resolution.

Savision believes that Microsoft Service Center provides insight and control over IT environments, but points out some significant challenges including integration of monitoring tools, an inability to determine impact, priority and responsible teams, and the difficulty in identifying root causes of service outages. Could you detail some of the challenges organizations using Microsoft Systems Center might face?

A common problem is alert noise caused by individual physical or virtual servers having problems. With the use of clusters and failovers, this means that most of these outages are not important to the business. In today’s IT environment, there’s a huge amount of complexity which is only increasing over time with virtualization and applications distributed over various geographic and functional locations. Agent-based monitoring of servers is still the main method of understanding problems within the IT fabric but, more and more, it doesn’t actually say anything about the business impact. The first thing that IT administrators hear about a problem is still when a business user calls the help desk to say their email or web application is down.

How would Savision address these challenges?

Firstly, Savision is able to correlate related alerts and simplify them. Instead of an IT administrator receiving ten alerts which result in confusion or time wasting as administrators process them one by one, Live Maps Unity correlates alerts to Business Services and alerts based upon that higher level context. It immediately reduces the alert noise and lets people see only the alerts they need to take action upon. This time saving is invaluable.

Also, by focusing on the business context, Live Maps Unity increases the importance of end user experience with regards to application performance. By introducing a Business Service Management framework, our technology forces IT administrators to think about and design end user synthetic transactions. These transactions sit on the business user side and simulate how an end user interacts with an application or service. If there are any problems from the user’s side, a notification will be sent to the IT administrator to act upon before a time-consuming phone call is put into the help desk.

The post is sponsored by Savision

By Jennifer Klostermann

Jennifer Klostermann

Jennifer Klostermann is an experienced writer with a Bachelor of Arts degree majoring in writing and performance arts. She has studied further in both the design and mechanical engineering fields, and worked in a variety of areas including market research, business and IT management, and engineering. An avid technophile, Jen is intrigued by all the latest innovations and trending advances, and is happiest immersed in technology.

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