Over the last few years, the heightened pace of innovation in service delivery technologies has increased the complexity of IT Operations Management for organizations of all sizes. This problem is particularly acute for Small and Medium Enterprises (SME’s) including regional managed service providers – which have traditionally operated with a lean staff and simpler but silo-based management systems. As long as the technologies they managed were relatively isolated and did not change rapidly, this management and monitoring structure worked fine. However, with the rapid advent of new technologies and the increasing pressure to do more with less – the very fabric of enterprise services has undergone a sea change.  

For example, converged communication services today no longer carry only data, but latency-sensitive voice and video packets that require considerable systems and application processing. Virtualized systems have completely overturned the conservative “one application per server” rule that was a costly, but safe choice for many IT managers. Expectations on utilization rates of virtualized servers are now pegged at more than fifty percent, instead of single digit rates.  Return on investment expectations has likewise increased considerably, and focuses on the effective delivery of end-to-end services (like say web apps, voice or video) rather than individual infrastructure availability. And lately, cloud based architectures are making resource allocation and monitoring even more dynamic and distributed.

While all of these changes have helped reign in IT budgets and do more with less, they also have introduced more specialized service components within scalable multi-tier architectures that are far more complex to manage and monitor. Many of these components are dynamic and can be moved or re-allocated based on advanced automated tools – for e.g. the movement of virtual machines across a server farm or entire applications from the enterprises premises to the cloud. Interestingly enough, while the first adopters of virtualization were large enterprises, recent analyst reports predict that x86 virtualization adoption in SME’s will outstrip large enterprise penetration levels in the next few years.

The implication of the structural shift in the nature of service delivery technologies and management is that SME’s will have to contend with vastly different kind of operational challenges going forward.

If you work in an SME or mid tier MSP organization – what kind of challenges do you see? On our part we will try and relate what we hear from our customers on this topic in later posts.