Most of us expect immediate delivery both as consumers and as employees. As employees, we are no longer willing to wait weeks for IT to deliver what we need. IT departments feel the pain that ensues from our urgency in the form of shadow IT. Shadow IT results in the double trouble of higher risk and cost from a weaker ability to enforce compliance and best practices when users stray to acquire their own IT services.
What’s that? You believe if you add more staff to address this issue it goes away? You may provide more services but at the same slower pace while increasing operational costs and decreasing operating profits. The key to maintaining IT discipline and delivering services faster is simply a judicious use of integrated automation and management. It dramatically increases your staff’s ability to execute quickly – to IT standards.
Cisco UCS Director is that missing piece that your staff needs to deliver services faster. It helps your staff deliver more services in minutes–not days or weeks. It lets your staff spend time to align IT with the business, instead of manually spinning up systems–and that’s what we all want.
Your IT staff does not have to manually manage each layer independently when they use Cisco UCS Director because they can execute automated workflows across virtual and physical resources.
Yes, I wrote virtual AND physical. Why should you care about physical? Virtualization does not accommodate every application. Compute intensive applications. I/O bound applications. Databases. All of these need horsepower only available from bare-metal servers. But here’s the catch: they need to be managed as physical elements. A solution that manages just virtual is only providing you with half the benefit and leaves you stuck with swivel chair management, isolated IT teams and isolated IT resources.
We all want IT services delivered faster. Cisco UCS Director lets IT do just that by deploying resources automatically and managing them in a unified way.
I urge you to spend a few minutes to explore the latest release from Cisco UCS Director. If you want to see this solution in action, we have live technical demos bi-weekly at multiple times to accommodate your time zone and/or calendar.
You said “Shadow IT results in the double trouble of higher risk and cost from a weaker ability to enforce compliance and best practices when users stray to acquire their own IT services.”
CIOs who think that they can mandate a punitive response to the Shadow IT phenomenon should think again. Line of Business leaders who take the initiative and deploy SaaS solutions, for example, have done so out of desperation. They don’t choose to become malcontent employees.
That being said, a unified infrastructure management solution deployment needs to acknowledge the policy mistakes that led to the current demand for a hybrid IT environment. I see workload assignment, via public or private cloud, becoming more of a meritocracy — where you *earn* the right to host the application. There is no de facto entitlement.
My point: perhaps IT organization that find themselves too focused on enforcing *compliance* would be wise to think more about the root causes of their current dilemma.