The Business Challenges We See Today

Over the next few weeks, I will be releasing a series of articles covering the value of data analytics and insight, focusing on five of the key business drivers that I have seen within the industry. With the IT landscape constantly changing, let’s look at what is driving businesses further down the path toward data analytics. More importantly, we will also look at the drive to understand what is happening within current infrastructures and how this knowledge can deliver value.

Business Continuity

In an ideal world, your organization would run effortlessly to provide both your business and your customers with data and resources at all times. In reality, no matter how successful, no business is without its challenges, and it often has to mitigate and eventually overcome these challenges to make sure the business can achieve its outcomes. One of the ways that organizations can prepare for disruptive events is through Business Continuity Management (BCM). For some businesses, this means deploying BCM software and creating business procedures to continue operating when the unexpected occurs. When I am talking to businesses about Business Continuity, it is important to highlight at an early stage what the business needs to keep running and what it is that they want to monitor. Deploying the right BCM software will help businesses identify, manage, and prevent issues before they occur. This has the added benefit of possibly reducing the need to activate disaster recovery or business continuity plans.

Compliance

Compliance has become a huge topic of conversation over the past year. The issue was prompted mainly by the introduction of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which goes into effect on the 25th of May 2018. I have spent the last year working with customers to help them understand the impact of GDPR, and the importance of making sure their businesses stay compliant. Now, I am no expert when it comes to its legalities, but what I have found is that becoming GDPR-compliant is not the major challenge. Instead, I have discovered that businesses are more concerned about staying compliant. It is important to have a monitoring tool that can help you maintain compliance from Security and Access control through to patch management and device tracking. These aren’t all tied to GDPR, but each one, working in collaboration, will help your business stay compliant.

Responsiveness

This challenge has been brought to my attention in many different ways. For me, responsiveness can mean anything having to do with networks, data access, hyperscaling, and even cloudbursting as the business needs. With the ever-changing user requirements, for applications, or the business as a whole, monitoring is crucial. Businesses want tools that can give them proactive information that will help them make the kind of decisions that guide them toward becoming competitive within the market.

Collaboration

As mentioned above, it is becoming more important to manage large infrastructures from one central management platform. As technologies move forward, there is no longer a one-stop shop for all your business requirements. Infrastructures and applications are brought in to supply the businesses needs from a plethora of vendors. It is important for businesses to stay agile to best meet the trends of the market. Therefore, they must use the best possible tools to help them achieve and keep that competitive edge.

Efficiency

It's common practice for businesses to run their infrastructures efficiently. As we all know, though, this isn’t as easy as it sounds. With multiple disparate environments all having their own operating system and management tools, it’s very hard to keep a track of it all. Increasingly, I find myself talking to customers about centralized management and efficiency. I believe the SolarWinds Orion Platform helps businesses manage those very specific challenges. Over the next four weeks, I am going to delve into each of these subjects individually in a lot more detail. I will also reveal how SolarWinds can help businesses deliver value using insightful data analytics.