Real-time infrastructure requires vision

Real-time infrastructure (RTI) is a fundamental shift in the way IT operates in any business. Instead of IT draining corporate coffers, RTI promises to deliver returns.

In 2004, Gartner said: "RTI promises greater agility and quality of service from the IT infrastructure, while simultaneously lowering costs. RTI depends on many technologies that will evolve through 2010."

Essentially, achieving RTI ensures that as much of the available computing power as possible is used for as much time as possible, and when a new business service is launched, it doesn't require a whole new system to drive it.

Gartner's definition is: "The ability to provision applications on the fly; to virtualise resources, to cost-effectively employ servers and storage to higher utilisation levels than experienced today; and to do this all in a heterogeneous environment to fundamentally adapt to changing business requirements in real-time."

In today's competitive business environment, companies must respond quickly to market changes.

Bernard Donnelly is consulting services manager at Unisys Africa.

Not many companies can do that today, as some of the components required to achieve RTI do not exist, but Gartner was right: it will take the IT industry more time to deliver a total solution. If companies depart on an RTI programme right now, they can achieve tangible business benefits.

More importantly, they can develop a roadmap to deploy the components of a total RTI system as they emerge. But to get the most out of the programme, IT managers and business executives must be aware of the five golden rules that align business and IT to meet customer needs.

There are no easy answers. RTI requires clients to have visibility into their business and technical architectures to identify the impact and benefit of achieving RTI.

The starting point then, generally, is enterprise modelling to yield the visibility and traceability to see the impact of changes.

RTI isn't a thing - it is a representation of a state of operational effectiveness. Achieving that desired state consists of several transitions, each characterised by increasing levels of business to IT governance and automated responses to events. There are three technologies that are rapidly maturing, which play key roles:

* The first is virtualisation, which treats IT's physical assets, such as servers, as a shared pool of resources. Virtualisation, when combined with other optimisation techniques, can significantly reduce the cost of IT operations.
* The second is services-oriented architecture, which drives a more responsive service creation environment - the ability to deliver new revenue generating services to clients, to create or maintain competitive advantage.
* Finally, business performance management encompasses automated self-management, where IT assets are allocated and deployed in response to business events, with little or no human intervention.

In today's competitive business environment, companies must respond quickly to market changes. IT environments must be flexible and agile to achieve that.

Achieving the vision of RTI enables the enterprise to harness change for its own advantage, by monitoring, interpreting, and acting on the key indicators of emerging opportunities and threats. Thus, RTI is more than a set of technologies. It's integral to a framework that connects a model-based view of the business, with IT and business process execution to create a closed loop that drives continuous business optimisation.

Gaining visibility into processes will allow companies to understand the impact changes have on their strategy.

The processes, applications and physical IT infrastructure must be monitored, and metrics recorded and analysed so business executives can develop a clear picture of the operation. Only then can they accurately re-engineer and align infrastructure and processes with service level agreements.

It's important that they can do this quickly since a competition culture has compressed the time businesses have to react to market changes.

Business service definitions flow into service delivery and provide a framework for current and future services that can be added and delivered to subscribers.

Companies that follow these five golden rules eliminate the guess-work to sharpen strategic decisions, reduce costs, enable growth, improve efficiencies, modernise ageing operations, make better use of current infrastructure and make change possible in incremental steps.