First reported on Sunday, software provider SolarWinds suffered a massive breach that has global implications on both public and private organizations. Acknowledged by SolarWinds, a supply chain attack trojanized the security vendor’s Orion product, which provides IT health and performance monitoring for large networks. The attack breached SolarWinds’ codebase and attached malicious code to Orion’s upgrade patch as early as last March. This allowed the attackers to create a backdoor to spy and steal data from government, critical infrastructure, and other major verticals for months.
Solar Winds has more than 300,000 customers worldwide, including most Fortune 500 companies, all five branches of the U.S. military, and several agencies, including the highest levels of the federal government. According to the company, less than 18,000 of its customers have installed the malware-laced Orion update. Thus far, the Department of Commerce and the U.S. Treasury are known victims of the breach, but more agencies and commercial enterprises are likely to disclose that their systems were compromised. U.S. officials suspect a Russian group known as APT29 is behind the intrusion campaign.
How can Centerity help?
Business continuity is one of the top objectives for supply chains, enterprises, and government agencies. Ensuring true 360-degree business continuity means monitoring three main pillars:
Health
Performance
Security
In addition to comprehensively monitoring them, it’s critically important to be able to correlate among the pillars and translate the outcomes to business impact. This pivotal ability to prioritize actions shortens mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR) whether there’s a glitch, a bug, or a breach.
Learn more
To learn more about how Centerity approaches 360-degree business continuity, please read our Platform Overview or contact us.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Centerity-dash-on-computer-730-x-480_0008_Layer-7.jpg7891200Arin Karimianhttps://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Centerity-Logo-1.pngArin Karimian2020-12-15 13:26:262021-03-08 13:46:29Briefing on the SolarWinds breach
As we all use printers, we usually select them based on standard criteria; however, it appears we are missing the most important one.
Getting access to your internal network is a severe security risk creating an enormous potential opportunity for hackers around the world.
How can we fix something we are blind to that can happen behind our backs?
You have to be notified about critical events or misconfigurations and be able to automatically block any malicious devices or potential threats.
Why choosing a printer is not just a matter of ink?
Canon, HP, Epson, Brother. This is just a short list of the most popular printers. You and your company most likely own one of them if not a few. How did you choose the most reliable ones? Depending on the line of work and the business of the company, some of the main factors to consider will be price, service quality, printing volume & speed and perhaps color contrast.
However, since they are connected to your network, did you ever stop to think that besides those factors and feedback on forums, you will need to address something as critical as security protection? Think again.
Your printer is a threat!
Even if you review your paycheck on a regular basis with a magnifier to ensure all the numbers are correct, you need to be aware of the security breaches your printer is exposing you to. First, document theft or hijacking – a potential GDPR breach but also think about hijacking your paycheck and changing the numbers. Second, changing settings to alter and reroute the printer jobs and get valuable data. Third, printers exposuring your network via rogue device thus adding a new area of vulnerability.
What if, a hacker (internal or external) would find the first security breach and alter the numbers on your salary sheet? Instead of the real numbers, they would modify it and reroute the actual money to their bank account. How big of an impact would that be on your company? On your own salary as an employee or the entire company’s employees? Just think about the bad reputation or the potential financial damage to everyone.
Getting access to your internal network presents a severe security breach and vulnerability with an enormous potential threat from hackers around the world. Just read about “Stackoverflowin”1 to know the potential damage that could have done!
Protect your printer!
How can we fix something we are blind about and can happen behind our backs (and let’s just say we are not teachers)?
Be notified about misconfigurations of devices and network, exposed assets & security postures and be alerted about malicious hardware and “uncontrolled” devices.
Secure & Block – protect the “innocent” printers internally and externally by applying the relevant configuration (i.e., use complex password) and securing their USB interfaces. You can also validate the connection on the physical layer or generate “two-way” authentication, but the most important method is to identify and block any malicious device once discovered.
Conclusion
Now that we understand that choosing a printer is not just by the amount of ink it consumes. It can do much more than print expense receipts. It can facilitate a change to your (precious) salary and be a conduit to an even more critical organizational content. Centerity wants to offer a solution.
You have to be notified of critical events or misconfigurations and be able to automatically block any malicious device or potential threats. For this purpose, Centerity’s Cyber AIOps platform includes rogue device mitigation and observability modules. Centerity knows how to identify and block malicious hardware attacks as they happen, while keeping your printer’s configuration safe based on security best practices.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Featured-Did-You-Know-scaled.jpeg25601710Arin Karimianhttps://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Centerity-Logo-1.pngArin Karimian2020-11-22 15:25:142021-01-12 18:03:30Did you know Hackers can reduce your salary
Writers: Stanislav (Stas) Siganevich, Retail Sector Manager and Snir Zarin, Solution Architect, Centerity.
I just wanted to have lunch but instead I’ve spotted a security breach. Does it make sense that a CISO needs to be physically present in a retail store to know about those threats?
Highlights
It appears there are physical threats which are not covered by the standard security tools.
Only by arriving locally to one of our retail stores, I could identify a huge potential unknown security breach.
How easy is it to use a malicious device to penetrate our organization defenses? Quite simple to be honest.
Found it by chance
I’m hungry, I thought to myself as I was finishing with the last of the FW rules and distributing them to all of the stores. The daily dilemma of “where to get my calories today” was irrelevant today because yesterday the retailer I worked with to opened a brand-new store with a deli nearby that looks very promising.
As I was marching to the elevator, I remembered that I didn’t distribute the latest patches to the new equipment in that very store I was going to get my lunch from, but… it can wait an hour, I guess. When I entered the store the smell of the fresh baked bread and smoked meat fills my lungs and I joined the long line on my quest to fulfill my gastronomic desires.
The line was moving slowly, so I decided to try to catch up with all of the emails, though it’s not really possible. The reception in the store was not that good so connecting to a corporate WIFI sounded like the quickest solution (the bonus of being an information security officer), but when I was searching for a desired network in the list something caught my eye – an unknown network clearly transmitting from within the store with a really strong signal.
Red alert, red alert, all warning signs went off. I pulled my Laptop from the briefcase and left the line – my smoked beef sandwich will have to wait for me.
I started looking around to see if I can spot something or someone unusual. Everyone was pretty much busy with their food, god I’m hungry, except for one young lady that was sitting with a laptop, but without even a coffee cup in sight, right next to her there was a slightly displaced digital billboard that we had just recently installed. When I started walking towards her to see what she’s doing she must have noticed my corporate badge and quickly close the lid of the computer and started to go towards the exit. I checked my phone and… the network was still transmitting. I got a bit closer, just close enough to see a small black device sticking out of the network sockets that were in use by the billboard. When I pulled that sucker out, the unidentified network went down. Another one under the belt. A few moments later I was again in the line for that divine sandwich, feeling like a hero, wondering, why can’t I clone myself, though the thought of “why my NAC solution did not stop this” had me a bit (a megabit to be frank) worried.
“45!” the teller shouted. That’s me!!!! Oh joy!! “One Brisket with pickles and Coke please”, I approved the payment with my watch and the guy turned away to prepare my meal. In the meantime, I had nothing to do but to explore the POS in front of me, one of those I have to distribute with the latest patches once I get back to the office. Big screen, wireless payment terminal, the new Verifone model is prettier than the previous one I thought to myself, but wait, what is that I see? 3 shining USB ports just staring at me, without any barrier, just 20 centimeters from my hand, unsupervised, unprotected, exposed to the whole world for abusing. Sometimes I just wish I could unsee things, but this is not the case. In case you do not see an issue with this situation, let me draw a picture for you: Anyone, yes, anyone, a customer, a supplier, an employee, can connect a rogue device to this USB, oh, sorry, first lets say a few words about “Rogue Device”:
By definition, Rogue devices are malicious by nature. They are devices that have intentionally been compromised to carry out cyberattacks including data breaches, malware and ransomware attacks. Manipulating a peripheral device with a small computer, such as the Beagle Bone Board, allows bad actors to remotely gain access to an organization’s network by creating an out of band connection to bypass an air-gapped network. From here, data can be extracted, or malware/ransomware can be installed without the end-user knowing it, causing organizations to be vulnerable to both exfiltration and injection. Often, rogue devices help attackers perform man in the middle (MiTM) attacks, whereby the device intercepts the message from the victim to the entity. The consequences are impactful, and these attacks can even allow attackers to bypass biometric authentication.
Again, I pick up the phone, and realized our existing MDM and NAC systems can’t recognize those kind of devices, as they appear legit to the operating system. I guess I need to find a solution which can track those malicious hardware foes instantly, without visiting our entire retail store network on a daily basis. Dam, do you remember that I have not eaten yet??
My sandwich is packed and I’m all set to go. I start walking toward the exit when I pass the new digital billboard that is being installed and… oh my eyes!!!! Corporate network socket is just waiting there for anyone to connect to, but I’m hungry, so we will pick it up in the next episode.
Conclusions
As existing security tools are not covering the new era types of Rogue devices, we need to find a resolution to close this vulnerability and fast. Rogue devices are cheap and available to all, especially to bad guys with bad intentions. Any open hardware slot is similar to any open port. We can compare it to a closed but unlocked door which can be opened simply by turning the door knob, open it and get full access.
What can you do? A lot. Centerity’s Cyber AIOps Module for Rogue Device Mitigation can prevent those malicious hardware devices from penetrating your network. We will be more than happy to show you how simply you can avoid those kinds of attacks and keep your organization safe.
Written by: Matan Reiman, VP of Business Development, Cyber AIOps Lead, Centerity.
Many people wish to be an internet celebrity in order to gain fame, influence and notability. Although, it is still hard work to become one, there is a good chance that you already are one of those internet stars and you just don’t know it yet…
Highlights
While security professionals often lack visibility of their organizations’ internet exposed assets, hackers are always on the lookout for such targets and case easily detected them
The statistics around misconfigurations are alarming and cybersecurity teams struggle to keep up and stay on top of this phenomenon
Using the right tools and increasing cyber hygiene can keep your organization from harm’s way
Be an internet star for the right reasons
When it comes to your personal brand, increasing your internet presence is important and can be very exciting. The prospect of becoming a powerful known influencer can bring along both social and financial benefits. But when it comes to your organization’s IT infrastructure, online exposure is a whole different story. Instead of fame and glory, your organization is risking a feature in the Wall Street Journal but for all the wrong reasons.
The reality on the ground is that all security teams today face unknown unknowns. With 70%1 of attacks being perpetrated by external threat actors, its crucial to understand what your organization’s digital footprint looks like and which unknown internet exposures you may have which hackers can easily find.
An average security tech stack today includes dozens of tools as well as awareness programs aiming to increase cyber resilience and improve the security posture. Nevertheless, millions of sensitive assets end up unintentionally exposed to the web and pose imminent threats to organizations. Such unknown exposures are low hanging fruit that are “waiting” to be exploited by hackers.
With so many tools and investment that goes into security programs, how come such blind spots are so prevalent? Simply put, misconfigurations and human errors.The natural maturation of businesses as well as digital transformation processes often translate into business growth but also mean that your IT ecosystem and digital footprint are growing and are in constant flux.
Spinning up new cloud instances, frequent deployment of development environments and adoption of new software tools are just a few examples of ongoing activities which often remain under IT and security teams’ radars and can easily result in risky misconfigurations.
Traditional tools are built for your known network ranges. Once set up, they will detect vulnerabilities and misconfigurations within pre-defined environments. But all your other connected assets will remain in the dark.
The numbers around misconfigurations which lead to unknown exposures are overwhelming. On average 64%2 of organizations’ digital assets are unintentionally exposed to the internet and not monitored. It’s time to take control of your critical assets before someone else does.
What can you do?
Here are 4 tips for achieving complete and ongoing visibility of your external attack surface.
Accept the fact that assessing vulnerabilities from the inside only is insufficient. If you want to stay ahead of hackers, you must also gain their point of view and observe your business from the outside-in.
Periodic and limited discovery exercises such as penetration testing are insufficient. With the current rate of change, exposed asset discovery should be fully automated, continuous and done at an internet-wide scale.
Your supply chain is part of your IT ecosystem and is a source for potential unknown exposures. You need a solution which can monitor and identify the risks caused by your business partners and contractors.
Full visibility is a must but not enough. Actionable security insights enriched with your business context is needed for quickly eliminating unwanted exposures.
Our advice… ensure your organization’s fame is driven by its success and not because a cybercriminal has managed to gain access to your sensitive data.
Conclusion
By gaining better visibility and converting unknown unknowns into known risks in real time, organizations can significantly mitigate and reduce security risks.
Centerity Cyber AIOps platform, with its unique attack surface management module is designed exactly for this purpose. With no installation or set up required, this solution indexes billions of exposed assets across the entire internet and automatically maps them back to your organization. You get real time visibility and insights into every potential risk across all your environments and the supply chain.
You’ll probably be surprised by the results! Talk with us!
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/pexels-andrea-piacquadio-842548-2.jpg8531280Arin Karimianhttps://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Centerity-Logo-1.pngArin Karimian2020-10-15 10:41:302021-01-27 10:21:10You are an internet star and you didn’t even know
IT operations pros worldwide are instantly part of wartime environments. They are supporting a massive number of people transitioning to remote work, shifting work models, and in most cases, extended hours. While the COVID-19 virus is putting a severe strain on corporate networks, servers, and security policies, it may also be causing major traffic jams on customer-facing websites. This is especially true for consumer-facing businesses in retail, healthcare and financial services. Above all, the new IT reality is testing each organization’s ability to deal with the unexpected and unplanned1.
According to Accenture2, the transition that many leading companies have been pursuing towards digital businesses must continue and even accelerate during times of crisis. Some of the critical business areas impacted are Operations, Commerce, User Experience, Supply Chain, Leadership, and the Workplace.Each one of these areas is essential to business requiring a holistic approach to digital transformation.
While we hope there will not be another event of this magnitude, changes that became necessary during these last few months will persist – the IT evolution will need to adapt to this new reality. Agility and adaptability are not buzz words anymore and have become an essential part of modern IT managements’ DNA. IT systems must adapt to a new, ever-changing, ever-evolving reality, implying that many assumptions companies had regarding their information technology ecosystems are no longer valid.
The Unexpected Demand Scenario
What happens when operations support systems such as remote access or VPN systems suddenly expand from serving 25% of the company to 100%, becoming business-critical? As workloads shift and secondary systems become business-critical, performance management becomes the only way to cope with the lack of resources in an on-premise or hybrid operating model.
Capacity planning is usually completed in advance according to trends with relatively constant consumption dynamics. In on-premise and hybrid architectures, new purchases may take months to provision. The only answer to cope with existing systems constraints and maintain regular operations is to have automation through an AIOps platform that can: (1) detect and even predict these new demands on systems; (2) detect performance problems proactively; and (3) execute remediation measures automatically to keep the systems performing optimally.
Deal with the New Reality
In the new reality, the transition from traditional, static, rules-based monitoring to dynamic AIOps is essential. Modern IT management teams can no longer wait for trends to become obvious as future operating behaviors will become more dynamic, more frequent and less predictable. Traditional monitoring and event management systems are based on static thresholds that primarily rely on assumptions derived from past experiences. As operating scenarios change rapidly in the new paradigm, dynamic behavioral analysis becomes the new doctrine for modern IT Operations. The manual adjusting of alert thresholds, the lack of correlation across interdependent domains, and reactive alarms are no longer acceptable when an average company may have more than 2,500 performance metrics per unique business service.
Driverless, IT Operations
Proactive analytics and automated responses are the new norm and ensure optimal system performance. Functionality like these will allow modern IT management teams to rapidly adapt to these new, unexpected realities without serious disruptions to current operations.
Centerity offers a modern AIOps platform married with Cyber AIOps capabilities that automatically learns the behavior of critical applications and business processes by using machine learning on a Big Data, Time-Series platform that can adapt dynamically without the need for human intervention.
As a result, IT management is empowered to adapt to new, unexpected realities in a matter of days without disrupting current operations.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/remote-it-operations-100.jpg9011501Marty Pejkohttps://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Centerity-Logo-1.pngMarty Pejko2020-04-15 14:40:132021-01-27 10:29:41Remote IT Operations is the New Norm
Centerity is an AIOps Platform that Delivers Dynamic Service Views and Business Service Level Analytics for Digitalization and Digital Transformation Initiatives to the business constituents responsible for these services. Each Dynamic Service View calculates the performance and availability of a critical business service as shown below.
Centerity Complements APM Solutions
APM solutions like AppDynamics, Dynatrace, Instana, and New Relic trace the execution of business transaction through the custom code that implements these transactions. Metrics like response time, calls per second and error rate are collected for each transaction, tier and application monitored by the APM tool. Centerity complements APM tools in the following respects:
APM tools cannot cover the entire IT stack down into virtualized and physical hosts, networking and storage – Centerity can
APM tools cannot roll up the performance and availability of the entire stack into Dynamic Service Views for business constituents – Centerity does this and incorporates the transaction and application metrics from the APM tools into the DSV’s.
The manner in which Centerity complements the APM tools is shown in the image below. The transaction, tier and application metrics for an application is which part of a business service monitored by Centerity are the top three layers in the Dynamic Service View. Centerity itself monitors the entire virtual and physical infrastructure that supports the applications including the VMware environment, the virtual and physical network and the storage.
Centerity is therefore uniquely able to translate IT infrastructure metrics, and application level metrics from APM tools into value for the business constituents who rely upon the entire IT stack to work correctly in order for the business service to deliver revenue or other business results to the business.
The Layers of a Centerity Dynamic Service View
Centerity is able to build the Dynamic Service Views out of the layers that comprise each business service by having a comprehensive platform that collects events, logs, and relationships from across the entire stack. The platform then builds the relationships in real-time over time and applies AI to automate anomaly detection.
The Centerity AIOps Platform
Centerity Functional Overview
Summary
APM tools are excellent at helping the teams that develop and support custom applications in production ensure that their code is working and performing as it should be, and in pointing to issues in the code when there are problems.
Centerity integrates in with the APM tools, to combine APM metrics with infrastructure metrics into valuable Dynamic Service Views for business constituents.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/AdobeStock_288623191.jpg8001200Marty Pejkohttps://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Centerity-Logo-1.pngMarty Pejko2019-10-15 14:54:122021-02-26 13:10:49Centerity Brings Business Value To APM
What is Digital Transformation? Digital Transformation means taking advantage of the fact the software based processes can be evolved and enhanced more frequently to dramatically drive up the business agility of the company, and to gain market share and revenue as a result. This is sometimes stated as “Compete online or die”, but it does not always have to involve people using browsers and mobile devices to access web services. The Imperative to Digitalize Core Business Processes The leading initiative for nearly every CIO (especially the ones who have rebranded themselves as Chief Digital Officers) is digitalization. Digitalization means that the key business processes of the company get implemented in software. This creates the following imperatives:
Drive online business results – revenue, customer acquisition, customer service, customer satisfaction, market share, and reputation
Time to Market – Implement key businesses in software more quickly than both current and emerging competitors
Rapid and Continuous Improvement – Rapidly improve those digitized processes in order to compete and gain market share
Great Customer Experience – Web and mobile experiences must be available all of the time, and offer excellent performance (responsiveness to user actions).
Fast Resolution of Problems – Every online system has issues, but they need to be prevented as often as possible and solved as quickly as possible.
Scale in Response to Demand – If the system is subject to spikes in demand (like online retail), then it needs to be able to response to dramatic increases in load without suffering from reliability and performance problems.
Be Cost Effective – Modern application teams need to be efficient with their time and need to avoid overspending on legacy and expensive toolsets.
In summary, every enterprise must now run like a highly agile, responsive and forward thinking SaaS software product company. The infographic below shows the important Digital Transformation trends for 2019.
Industry Changes caused by Digitalization Digitalization is creating unprecedented demand for the resources (primarily the people) who know how to implement business processes in software (software developers and architects) and the people who know how to operate complex application systems in production with high reliability and performance (cloud and applications operations). The most important architectural change is the shift to a microservices architecture which allows each microservice to be independently enhanced – leading to dramatically shorter application development cycle times, dramatically increased technical and business agility and dramatically increased online competitiveness. The demand to implement business processes in software exceeds the supply of knowledgeable people, which is fueling a set of innovations designed to speed the delivery of software into production, and ease the process by which highly complex, dynamic, and scaled out applications are supported in production. Complex Multi-Cloud Architectures Today the question is not whether to do cloud, but which clouds and how many different ones will be deployed. For most enterprises an on premise private or hybrid cloud based upon VMware vSphere is a reality. For these enterprises going to the public cloud often means adding the public cloud to their environment instead of replacing their on premise or collocated environment. This means that for cloud operations teams, the cloud is a source of increased complexity, not a source of simplification.
Innovation and Dynamic Behavior across the Stack The imperative to digitalize core business processes, and the resulting shortage of people who can do the work is fueling as set of process and technology innovations designed to speed business functionality implemented in software into production. These process innovations (DevOps and CI/CD) and technology innovations (containers, and the dynamic infrastructure upon which they run) are being brought to bear to help development teams be more agile and effective to help support teams deliver better reliability and performance results to the business. These layers of innovation are shown in the diagram below.
The above architectural (microservices), and process (CI/DC) innovations, combined with the diversity in the stack, and the dynamic behavior across the stack create an unprecedented monitoring and management challenge for modern online enterprises. This challenge is compounded by a high rate of innovation which constantly increases the complexity and diversity of the environment. The Problem with Legacy Monitoring Approaches Digital Transformation produces new critical business services which must be monitored and managed holistically. However, ever since the death of the monitoring frameworks from IBM, BMC, CA and HP, monitoring has devolved into a best of breed approach leaving enterprises with between 20 and 200 different tools, none of which give the business the visibility into the reliability and performance of these new critical business services. The Franken-Monitor
Monitoring Challenges with Modern Applications, Stacks and Processes The modern application, development process, and technical stack, combined with dynamic behavior across the stack, create the following new and unprecedented challenges for monitoring solutions:
Modern apps are highly scaled out (many things to monitor – hundreds and thousands of microservices in production)
Modern apps are highly dynamic (high rate of change in scale and new versions – multiple releases of new software into production every day)
Modern apps are very diverse (many different languages and stacks – with the need for developer productivity driving ever more diversity)
Business services are often comprised of not just the modern applications, but previously developed N-Tier application, monolithic applications and purchased applications.
As stated above, the environment spanning the on premise private cloud and the new public clouds is more complex than ever and more dynamic than ever.
Due to the above factors modern apps are very complex and addressing issues consumes time and expensive resources. In fact Gartner predicts that, “By 2020, 75% of enterprises will experience visible business disruptions due to infrastructure and operations (I&O) skills gaps, which is an increase from less than 20% in 2016”.
Making Sure It All Works All of the Time The applications and business services that result from Digital Transformation initiatives must work all of the time, and must provide an excellent user experience all of the time in order for these new services to meet their business objectives. The technical challenges associated with managing these applications in production mean that a new approach must be taken to monitoring them in production. The following requirements must be met:
The entire stack must now be monitored in real time (1 Min – 1 Sec) to be able to detect service quality issues in time
Flows, relationships and dependencies across the stack must be determined in real time
AI (AIOps) must be deployed to cope with the deluge of incoming monitoring data and automatically understand normal vs. abnormal
AIOps and relationships must be leveraged for automated root cause and ultimately automated remediation.
The results of monitoring must be made relevant to business constituents
The Need for Business Visibility Since these new software based business services are so critical to the business, business constituents like product managers and business executives responsible for the results of these services need consolidated visibility and manageability across the entire stack of technologies that comprise each service. Centerity’s Dynamic Service Views provide this visibility. Centerity’s Dynamic Service Views Centerity’s Dynamic Service Views consolidate the availability, performance, throughput, and error rate of the entire software and hardware stack that supports each critical business service into a service level gauge that allows business constituents to easily understand how the business services supported by these stacks are actually working.
The Centerity AIOps Platform Centerity delivers these Dynamic Service Views through a comprehensive AIOps platform that works with the existing monitoring tools, virtualization platforms and cloud platforms in use at the customer. Metrics, events and logs are collected across the entire stack, and evaluated by an AIOps engine for anomalies. Degradations in service levels are the surfaced in Dynamic Service Views and forwarded to alert and service management systems.
Centerity Functional Overview
Summary Modern business services are composed of new applications, existing applications, custom developed applications and purchased applications. The software and hardware infrastructure for these new business services is updated frequently and operates in a dynamic manner. This creates a new imperative to be able to monitor the resulting business services in a continuous and full-stack manner.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/AdobeStock_334109487.jpg8001200Marty Pejkohttps://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Centerity-Logo-1.pngMarty Pejko2019-10-15 13:32:132021-02-26 13:11:17Why Digital Transformation Needs AIOps
In an era of digital transformation, stakeholders like business planners and executives find themselves increasingly dependent on IT services not only for routine business operations, but also for evolving their business models to become more competitive and more customer-aware. At the same time, IT executives and innovators find themselves increasingly pressured to show value and accelerate service delivery while minimizing costs and eliminating IT inefficiencies. This combination echoes Dickens’ “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” in its mixture of innovative opportunity with outstanding pressures to perform faster and more effectively without breakage or loss.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/AdobeStock_108675541.jpg8001200Marty Pejkohttps://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Centerity-Logo-1.pngMarty Pejko2019-06-25 13:47:572021-02-26 13:13:15Recorded EMA Webinar – A Look at the Changing IT-to-Business Landscape
The retail industry has changed significantly over the past decade and it keeps on evolving further and faster by adopting new, cutting edge technologies while transforming from a classic store to an omnichannel business that is not limited to one country or to the physical world at all.
While these businesses strive forward, some of them open new online or offline stores every day, their infrastructures can’t sometimes keep up with the pace.
The modern store is a vast collection of technologies: Points of Sale, Self-checkout kiosks, payment and security systems and operational technologies like refrigerators and baking ovens. Most of these technologies are not limited to the store and rely on many different backend systems which in their turn rely on other systems which often span multiple vendors and service providers. This huge, interconnected network of technologies is very hard to keep track of and when problems start you need to be ready to identify and solve them fast or suffer the consequences.
The State of Online Commerce
Digital transformation is no longer about if enterprises will transform, but about when. Companies that have not embraced transformation, such as Kodak, Blockbuster or Borders have disappeared, and even technology companies like Nokia, that have failed to change with the times, are now struggling to survive.
Source: Profitindustry.com May 2019
The accelerated pace of economic change is compressing the lifecycle of businesses and those that don’t digitally transform will be rendered irrelevant; and it will happen with remarkable speed, and with little warning.
Digital transformation is not just about technology; it’s about redefining your entire business strategy. The degree of difficulty is compounded by the dearth of experienced resources. According to Forrester, in 2017, 74% of companies have a digital transformation strategy, but only 15% have the skills and capabilities to implement it.
The Changes Driven by Digital Transformation
Digital Transformation is a disruptive process and it will not only “transform” your IT department but also will change all aspects of your business, including; the way you relate with your customers, your partners, and your suppliers.
In this document, we will focus on the intrinsic technological requirements, not the business process aspects of the process.
At its core, Digital transformation drives some key changes:
Every key business process of the company and the interactions with every key constituency are implemented in software and are rapidly evolved to maintain competitive advantage online.
Data driven applications are deployed on cloud-based infrastructure and every facet of the supply chain is connected through the cloud.
Real-time data analytics for notifications and abnormality detection (AIOps).
Big Data to optimize system performance in reaction to change.
Users now must have a connected device to see the necessary information on cloud.
Applications should be able to adapt to different environments (on-premise, Cloud, containers, etc.), detect and inform environmental changes and proactively change their behavior accordingly.
The Omnichannel Approach
The term OmniChannel refers to better introspection of the customer experience by understanding where, when, how, and of course, what he/she wants. It means offering the customers a real-time, on-demand, cloud-based, self-service experience through the convergence of all the channels. With information coming from virtually everywhere (on premise, cloud systems, IoT, mobile applications, etc.) and in real time, it is critical to have applications that can provision these sources of information efficiently, and in real time.
OmniChannel may include:
Online browser based applications
Mobile applications (owned and 3rd parties)
Kiosks
Telephone Interactive Voice Response
Social media
Help desk
Physical locations (branches, plants, etc.)
One of the most critical components of the OmniChannel strategy is the backend.
As with any other multi-technology support (IoT, Cloud, on-premise, Mobile, etc.) it needs a myriad of connecting elements and workflows to pull, push and normalize the information flows. The business in turns needs to guarantee that these business flows are working correctly, as they are becoming the bloodline of the digital business.
An OmniChannel approach at a Global Fast Food Restaurant
What Happens When Things Go Wrong?
Online systems in retail directly support the revenue generation of the company, and when they are not working correctly also damage the reputation of the company, and the ability to retain customers. So an outage does not just represent a one-time loss of revenue, it often causes customers to leave and to never return.
Immediate revenue loss, stock market crashes and reputation damage cause retailers billions of dollars of damage every year!
The Centerity Solution
The Centerity AIOps Platform has a proven history in supporting business service outcomes across complex enterprise and managed service environments. Centerity is built on strong operational analytics and data mining, as well as powerful discovery, visualization, and dependency insights. Highlighted features include the following:
Deep and Broad Integrations: Centerity integrates with the tools and platforms that you rely upon.
Dynamic Service Views: Simple to understand gauges that show the service quality for each critical business service
In Context: Constant alignment between IT data and business objectives.
Consistent User Experience: Detect user experience degradation before your users do.
Traffic Analysis: Analyze bandwidth consumption and data flow; filter by application, packets, protocols, etc.
AI-driven Anomaly Detection: Machine learning for digital services moves the performance discipline beyond thresholds
The Centerity AIOps Platform
Centerity Functional Overview
Centerity’s Dynamic Service Views translate technical metrics and their impact on business services and resultant consequences.Each gauge represents the availability, performance, throughput and error rate of the entire stack of software and hardware supporting each digital business service.
Unified Dynamic Business Service Views
When service levels degrade, Centerity provides a bird’s eye view of how the operation of each layer that supports the digital business service is impacting the overall service level.
Drill Down Into Each Layer of a Digital Business Service
We all spend many hours talking about digital transformation at work. At home we book our movie tickets on our phones, make payments using internet banking, and grocery shop on Amazon.
Statistics show that 71% of shoppers in the US and up to 91% in APAC countries prefer to shop online and this tendency is growing around 23% year over year. Up to 58% of these operations are performed via mobile devices like phones and tablets.
Latin American markets are the most active and are shifting from consuming largely global companies’ products towards their local products. For example, in Mexico (growing 7% in electronics shopping and 20% in online services between 2017 and 2018), local shops are taking the leading position in the ranking of purchases orders while global players, such as Amazon and Wish, are relegated to 4th or 5th place. In Brazil, the situation is similar; there are currently 66.4 million eCommerce users, with an additional 28.2 million users expected to be shopping Online by 2021. By 2023 these 94.6 million eCommerce users will spend an average of over $300 yearly online.
Growth rate of e-commerce sales in selected Latin America 2017-2018 (Source: Statistica)
Where will you be in 5 years?
Digital transformation is no longer about if enterprises will transform, but about when. Companies that have not embraced transformation, such as Kodak, Blockbuster or Borders have disappeared, and even technology companies like Nokia, that have failed to change with the times, are now struggling to survive.
The accelerated pace of economic change is compressing the lifecycle of businesses and those that don’t digitally transform will be rendered irrelevant; and it will happen with remarkable speed, and with little warning.
Digital transformation is not just about technology; it’s about redefining your entire business strategy. The degree of difficulty is compounded by the dearth of experienced resources. According to Forrester, in 2017, 74% of companies have a digital transformation strategy, but only 15% have the skills and capabilities to implement it.
The concern for many businesses is that they’ve already fallen behind and may be too late to get started. Digital speed
Companies that are not agile enough or cannot adapt to economic tides may end up stranded in shallow waters. Today’s consumers have countless options so keeping up is the only way to remain relevant, to survive.
Digital transformation will enable your company to:
Generate additional sources of revenue online
Be more agile in pursuit of new markets and opportunities
Improve interactions with customers, partners, suppliers and employees
Increase efficiency
Improve business decision making
Implement better governance
To have real impact the transformation must become a part of the fabric of the company and championed by leadership.
A complicating factor is that digital transformation may mean different things to different industries, and a valuable benefit for banking, may not apply to healthcare.
The following is an example of applications for different verticals.
Digital Transformation benefits by Vertical Market
The Tao of Transformation
Digital Transformation is a disruptive process and it will not only “transform” your IT department but also will change all aspects of your business, including; the way you relate with your customers, your partners, and your suppliers.
In this document, we will focus on the intrinsic technological requirements, not the business process aspects of the process.
At its core, Digital transformation drives some key changes:
Every key business process of the company and the interactions with every key constituency are implemented in software and are rapidly evolved to maintain competitive advantage online.
Data driven applications are deployed on cloud-based infrastructure and every facet of the supply chain is connected through the cloud.
Real-time data analytics for notifications and abnormality detection (AIOps).
Big Data to optimize system performance in reaction to change.
Users now must have a connected device to see the necessary information on cloud.
Applications should be able to adapt to different environments (on-premise, Cloud, containers, etc.), detect and inform environmental changes and proactively change their behavior accordingly.
The OmniChannel
The term OmniChannel refers to better introspection of the customer experience by understanding where, when, how, and of course, what he/she wants. It means offering the customers a real-time, on-demand, cloud-based, self-service experience through the convergence of all the channels. With information coming from virtually everywhere (on premise, cloud systems, IoT, mobile applications, etc.) and in real time, it is critical to have applications that can provision these sources of information efficiently, and in real time.
OmniChannel may include:
Online browser based applications
Mobile applications (owned and 3rd parties)
Kiosks
Telephone Interactive Voice Response
Social media
Help desk
Physical locations (branches, plants, etc.)
One of the most critical components of the OmniChannel strategy is the backend.
As with any other multi-technology support (IoT, Cloud, on-premise, Mobile, etc.) it needs a myriad of connecting elements and workflows to pull, push and normalize the information flows. The business in turns needs to guarantee that these business flows are working correctly, as they are becoming the bloodline of the digital business.
An OmniChannel approach at a Global Fast Food Restaurant
ERP and digital transformation
ERP systems are in the core of this transformation, as they manage the supply chain and often the order to cash process as well. SAP, the global leader in ERP systems is helping its customers drive Digital Transformation with its own Digital Transformation Platform shown below.
The industry’s response to the pressures generated by digital transformation
It is an imperative for modern enterprises to compete online and to digitally transform their operations. This places demands upon the scarce resources (people) that can build and operate these digital applications, business services and systems.
The technology industry has responded to the demand to implement business processes in software with a set of innovations. The architecture of applications is being further distributed and simplified around a microservices model. The process of delivering software into production is being automated as much as possible through CI/CD. At each layer of the technology stack new languages, services, and data architectures are being invented to meet new needs. Finally the operation of the environment is now automated.
Innovations and Dynamic Behavior across the Entire Technology Stack
An unprecedented situation in the modern enterprise:
Enterprises must compete and execute online as software vendors (Revenue, Cost Efficiency, Time to Market, Agility, Quality of Service, End User Experience)
An unprecedented pace of innovation in processes and technology to support the business imperative of digitization creates previously unheard of levels of complexity and diversity.
Time to market and agility pressures are causing applications to be architected around microservices and released multiple times a day with CI/CD processes leading to more change in production than ever before.
The need for continuous availability and performance is driving dynamic behavior in virtualized and cloud based compute, networking and storage services.
All of this has to work flawlessly all of the time and is beyond the scope of any single monitoring vendor to monitor
A new set of requirements for making sure it all works all of the time
Many companies still monitor their services using siloed tools. These tools are inefficient, providing a bottom-up view, which fail in modern applications and business services, where multichannel, containers, and multi-cloud environments are the new de-facto service architecture standard. A new concept in monitoring is required; one that can comply with the following conditions:
The entire stack must now be monitored in the present (1 Min – 1 Sec) to be able to detect service quality issues in real time.
Relationships across the stack must be determined in instantly
What talks to what (traces and flows)?
What runs on what?
What is a component of what?
AIOps must be deployed to leverage relationships for automated root cause analysis and remediation.
The results of system monitoring must be made relevant to business constituents.
It is not sufficient to monitor the IT infrastructure, application, and business services as separated silos. In real digital transformation, all the services components must be observed, correlated, and presented in a single dimension, and easily understood by both IT and the business, supplemented by predictive behavior analysis.
AIOps platforms at the core of Digital Transformation
Business outcomes cannot be adequately supported and achieved while IT organizations remain in siloed pockets with redundant tools and technologies. For this reason, AIOps Platforms now complement the conventional, siloed IT monitoring systems to cope with the torrent of incoming monitoring data and to discern abnormalities automatically.
By targeting thousands of components from the infrastructure, application and business layers simultaneously, AIOps can correlate, predictively analyze, and self-repair any irregularity, while presenting pertinent visualizations to both key stakeholders and IT operations personnel to quickly understand business service performance.
When properly integrated into a broader capability for data assimilation, integrations, and automation, AIOps can align IT with business in a very concrete way.
Gartner’s View of AIOps Platforms
The features that distinguish AIOps platforms from less advanced implementations of machine learning include the following:
Assimilation of data from cross-domain sources in high data volumes for cross-domain insights.
Access multiple data types, e.g., events, KPIs, logs, flow, configuration data, etc.
Capabilities for self-learning to deliver predictive, and/or prescriptive and/or if/then actionable insights.
Potential use as a strategic overlay that may assimilate multiple monitoring tools and other investments.
Integrations that can help unify stakeholders and bridge the political divides across IT and between IT and business stakeholders.
Support for private cloud, public cloud, SAAS, and on-premise, in one platform.
The ability to deliver on multiple use cases, such as business service performance and availability management, as well as integrated support for change and change impact awareness, and enabling more successful cloud migrations, resulting in greater optimizing of critical business outcomes.
An Introduction to Centerity
The Centerity AIOps Platform has a proven history in supporting business service outcomes across complex enterprise and managed service environments. Centerity is built on strong operational analytics and data mining, as well as powerful discovery, visualization, and dependency insights. Highlighted features include the following:
Deep and Broad Integrations: Centerity integrates with the tools and platforms that you rely upon.
Dynamic Service Views: Simple to understand gauges that show the service quality for each critical business service
In Context: Constant alignment between IT data and business objectives.
Consistent User Experience: Detect user experience degradation before your users do.
Traffic Analysis:Analyze bandwidth consumption and data flow; filter by application, packets, protocols, etc.
AI-driven Anomaly Detection: Machine learning for digital services moves the performance discipline beyond thresholds
The Centerity AIOps Platform
Centerity’s Dynamic Service Views translate technical metrics and their impact on business services and resultant consequences.Each gauge represents the availability, performance, throughput and error rate of the entire stack of software and hardware supporting each digital business service.
Unified Dynamic Business Service Views
When service levels degrade, Centerity provides a bird’s eye view of how the operation of each layer that supports the digital business service is impacting the overall service level.
Drill Down Into Each Layer of a Digital Business Service
How Centerity can help you with your Digital Transformation
Centerity helps you improve the top line business results (revenue, market share, customer satisfaction) of your digitalization transformation projects, and helps you minimize the number of disruptions and the cost and time to repair those disruptions. By providing a holistic view of both infrastructure and business through relevant visualizations enterprises can maintain command before, during, and after the transformation.
Before the transformation:
Centerity automates the discovery of legacy business communication flows and ascertains application service topologies accurately, saving the time and risk associated with performing this manually.
Centerity pinpoints performance bottlenecks and establishes standards before the service transformation so that you can compare before and after situations, ensuring that you are fully prepared to go live successfully.
Centerity distinguishes traffic patterns so that you can plan your services migration steps more cost-effectively, minimizing your expense during the migration.
During the transformation:
Centerity highlights application behavior anomalies and detects fluctuations in the application performance, compared to history, ensuring exceptional performance from day one, keeping the project on a positive track.
Centerity ensures a stress-free transition by monitoring new architectures, such as micro apps, containers, and multi-cloud resources as well as their relationship with legacy architectures, such as the mainframe, distributed storage, or on-premise resources.
Centerity’s flexible and intuitive interface will allow your technical resources, to economically adjust legacy interfaces and build fresh ones for the migrated systems. Developing interfaces can often be an unexpected, time consuming, expensive step in the process.
After the transformation:
Centerity’s Dynamic Service Views for the migrated services result in IT infrastructure metrics pictured in a way business partners can understand, allowing everyone to work together efficiently in “the new world”.
Project costs are considerably reduced, as well as the ongoing cost of ownership thanks to Centerity’s ability to integrate virtually any infrastructure technology and third-party software tools.
Proactive analytics reveal valuable insights for all areas of the business, including commercial transactions, purchase tickets, point of sales performance, etc.
Summary:
Centerity should be considered before, during, and after your digital transformation project to insure you achieve your objectives at a suitable cost and effort. Learn more about Centerity at www.centerity.com.
Authors:
The following people at Centerity contributed to this paper:
John Reuben – Director of Strategic Relationships, Americas. [email protected]
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/AdobeStock_394340841-1030x687-1.jpg6871030Marty Pejkohttps://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Centerity-Logo-1.pngMarty Pejko2019-06-24 14:02:132021-02-26 13:18:39Digital Transformation in Latin America It’s A Digital World
Best Practices in Performance Analytics for Big Data Environments (SAP HANA, Hadoop, Enterprise Applications)
Use Case #5 – Creating Transparency & A Common Purpose
Synopsis:
A Single Truth
The Power of Sharing Information and Goals
Use Case Overview
Many organizations are challenged due to technical specialization within its departments. This leads to siloed goals aligned only with the technology layer of immediate concern.
To make organizations more service and application centric, IT needs to share information on organizational goals and service level status. By sharing information across technical and functional domains, people have better insights into performance, availability, and continuity. This inspires employees to think about service and business value and less about their individual domains in isolation. Centerity can be that single point of truth for the entire organization providing one view of the entire stack so everyone is working from the same baseline and towards common goals.
Executive Dashboards and BSM views highlight organizational goals and deliverables that transcend individual technologies and priorities.
Centerity is proud to be Lenovo’s featured software solution at SAPPHIRE 2018, Orlando.
We welcome you to join us at Booth #558 to learn how Lenovo and Centerity can improve service levels (SLA) and customer satisfaction (CSAT) for SAP HANA environments.
The presentation will occur on Tuesday, June 5, at 12:15 PM, and will show how Business Service Management (BSM) has become a reality,
providing real-time performance analytics for specific business processes that cross the entire IT stack (applications, infrastructure, operating systems, Cloud, Big Data, etc.).
Kamran Amini, GM & VP, Data Center Infrastructure at Lenovo said, “The combination of Centerity and Lenovo solutions enables us to deliver the best experience for SAP HANA customers by providing complete, end-to-end performance analytics for complex IT environments. When combined with Lenovo systems, Centerity’s unique capabilities for monitoring and managing data center landscapes, including SAP HANA environments, helps ensure Lenovo customers experience maximum performance, reliability and return from their investment.”
Centerity will present a performance optimization use case using Lenovo’s SAP HANA Vora-powered Crime Scene Investigation solution.
We would be delighted to meet you at SAPPHIRE to discuss best practices for aligning technology and business environments (P&L), while also improving SLA and CSAT.
You can schedule a meeting time here:
Here is a sneak peek for Centerity’s offer on SAPPIRENOW:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOq2XWdaqOM
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Centerity-dash-on-computer-730-x-480_0005_AdobeStock_361685879.jpg8001200Marty Pejkohttps://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Centerity-Logo-1.pngMarty Pejko2018-05-18 15:09:232021-02-26 13:13:48Lenovo Highlights Performance Analytics for SAPHANA
We came, we saw, we conquered. Three days packed with breakout sessions, hands-on training, keynote speakers, networking. With over 250 CIOs, 80 speakers and panelists, 50+ inspiring keynotes and top 500 largest spending companies, there was a lot to see and it’s impossible to be in every place at once but, here’s our rundown of the top four highlights from IDC CIO Summit ‘18 at Antalya, Turkey:
Customers innovating around the world –
Amidst the sea of booths in the IDC CIO SUMMIT 2018, some of our top customers were featured in Centerity’s monitoring and Business Service Management round Table. Big-brand banks, insurance companies and retail chains, showed off how their businesses are innovating around the world (with Centerity’s help, of course!) Attendees could engage in Centerity’s unified IT monitoring and performance analytics DEMO and conversations to learn more about how Centerity can help them succeed.
Businesses are innovating around the world
Matan Reiman, VP Sales – EMEA shows how Centerity’s unified IT monitoring and performance analytics helps companies succeed.
We’ve pretty much received a common feedback from CIOs :
“We have developed internally a monitoring tool to monitor our IT environment. We currently use different tools to monitor different layers and cannot receive an end-to-end view. We wish we could have single dashboard with an holistic view to our business and an ability to produce reports”.
IDC observation:
Almost 60% of companies in Turkey have not yet formed a digital transformation (DX) strategy, while the main goal for those that have is to improve automation and efficiency. Main rivers for DX initiatives in companies include the adoption of new technologies used by partners and customers, the emergence of new business models, and — obviously — staying competitive in their market.
Everybody talks about the weather, but Nobody does anything about it” (Mark Twain)
The future of IT/OT monitoring
The future of IT/OT monitoring and performance analytics is heading toward Business Service Management (BSM). This trend was reinforced in IDC CIO SUMMIT as what most IT decision makers expressed their need to achieve an alignment between IT performance metrics with business objectives.
“We suffer if we do not have dedicated Business Service Management for SAP. As IT environment is getting more complex and IoT usage areas are growing Business Service Management is much more crucial for us”.
The true value of BSM is that companies capture a comprehensive set of IT/OT performance metrics (from the full stack) and access it from a common repository. Furthermore, this performance data can be normalized, weighted and analyzed according to key business processes and correlated against required service levels (SLAs).
A BSM solution provides IT organizations with a distinct competitive advantage to reduce costs (through proactive troubleshooting and predictive maintenance), improve uptime (through faster MTTR and break-fix response), and increase CSAT (through better performance and reliability).
Transformation, Innovation and Digital workplace
Transformation and Digital workplace: digital workplace in a modern enterprise became more and more complex.
The spirit of innovation was embedded throughout the summit but shone brightest during the Transformation, BT Innovation and Digital Workplace panel. After an introduction about the way digital workplace in a modern enterprise became more and more complex, while also increasingly independent of hardware platforms, the panel was underway. Cuneyt Ozdilek, Deputy General Manager of Operations, KoçSistem Information and Communication Services ;Serhan Ozhan, CIO & CTO, CK Enerji; and Dr. Erdar Kemikli, Head of IT & Innovation, Otokoç Otomotiv were engaged in an emotional conversation about Maintaining Infrastructure vs Scalable Service Oriented IT Support.
The take away: We’ve come a long way! from legacy/traditional monitoring tools, the days of Robust IT and traditional hardware monitoring, to an unified IT monitoring and performance analytics platform with its single-pane-of-glass dashboard, where users have instant access to root cause analysis and failure trends. But, we have a long way to go where almost 60% of companies in the Central and Eastern Europe have not yet formed a digital transformation strategy.
And that’s a wrap for IDC CIO SUMMIT ‘18 – see you next year!
Centerity’s EMEA team is looking forward next years IDC CIO SUMIIT
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Centerity-dash-on-computer-730-x-480-mssp.jpg8001200Marty Pejkohttps://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Centerity-Logo-1.pngMarty Pejko2018-04-18 16:03:142021-02-26 13:14:17The Top Highlights from IDC CIO SUMMIT 2018, Antalya, Turkey.
“We’ve deployed several solutions to track our technology assets, manage SLA, and align IT with Business, but our efforts went very poorly. We receive very little return for our investment”.
To properly support corporate objectives, IT professionals need to align service levels (SLAs) with business objectives. Although achieving this alignment can be difficult, when properly implemented the resulting solution (called Business Service Management – BSM) is critically important for technology-driven businesses. An effective BSM solution delivers a consolidated view of every technology asset and how each one affects SLA, providing the insights needed to reduce operations costs and improve uptime. Unfortunately, traditional approaches for developing BSM solutions have repeatedly failed, causing Gartner to claim that “BSM Is Dead”. This blog will start the important process of disputing Gartner’s claim because the truth is, BSM is not dead. In fact, only a stand-alone BSM solution can consistently align technology and business objectives. From our perspective it would have been better for Gartner to say, “Traditional BSM is dead but a fresh approach can bring a new BSM generation.”
Traditionally, IT departments and system integrators develop custom BSM solutions based on one of many different technologies: a configuration management database (CMDB); a fault management console; application performance management (APM); data analytics, etc. Using a CMDB (inventory-based) or fault management (alert-based) system as the foundation for BSM is a challenge because neither of these systems is designed to evaluate service levels or optimize business value. Data analytics and APM also struggle to deliver the promise of BSM as they fail to recognize cause-effect and relationships that exist within (and across) business services. Finally, because traditional BSM solutions are tailor-made they tend to be “fragile”, requiring constant attention to support the frequent changes, revisions and updates that occur in a typical IT environment (i.e., new applications, deployments, devices, and configurations that get implemented over time).
A lot of companies that pursue a custom-built BSM solution, find that making/ maintaining integrations across multiple systems (that often change) is only a fraction of the cost. The biggest risk for traditional BSM projects is scope-creep, where different departments suggest additional “required” functionality. Each of these new capabilities has time, cost, and quality implications, and most companies struggle to agree on urgent, important, and nice-to-have features. The result is a never-ending BSM development cycle that fails to deliver the promised business results. This experience has convinced IT departments that building a BSM solution is difficult and costly (in terms of both budget and reputation) and instead they fall back on service desk metrics to approximate SLA measurements.
Building a true BSM solution is challenging because it is difficult to define and model dependencies and relationships across multiple technology layers and business processes, and because it is difficult to maintain a custom-built system over time. The result is that IT departments have largely given up trying to deliver true BSM solutions because they don’t deliver much value to IT (aside from faster troubleshooting and fewer false positives). However, the primary objective of BSM solutions is not to improve IT, it is to improve the overall business while making IT better. Traditional approach solutions (such as Fault Management) fail to deliver value at the service level, struggle to properly correlate events with root causes, and lack comprehensive monitoring and analysis. Because so many companies pursued custom-built solutions they failed to realize the promises of Service Management and have been forced to bridge the gap by throwing more IT analysts and administrators at the problem. If this is the case, what’s the resolution?
With so much noise around IT performance analytics, we will have a future blog that goes deeper into the challenges of delivering a true BSM/SLA solution. Until then I invite you to contact us to learn how Centerity improves the cost, time, and quality of your business operations, including full-stack BSM and performance analytics. We would be happy to share how our customers benefit from a single-pane-of-glass that allows decision makers to measure end-to-end performance and correlate it to SLA, bringing a whole new meaning to the term Business Service Management. Gartner’s obituary was a bit premature because BSM isn’t dead, it’s just getting started.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/AdobeStock_130231993-1030x687-1.jpg6871030Marty Pejkohttps://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Centerity-Logo-1.pngMarty Pejko2018-04-10 18:47:132021-02-26 13:17:12Bridging the Gap Between Promise and Reality: Achieving SLA and the Return of BSM
Enterprises and service providers constantly worry about loss of time, money and unscheduled downtime and look for new or better ways to overcome the conflicting demands for higher performance with lower costs.
when problems do occur (and they always do), system administrators need to avoid long, drawn-out processes of fault identification and root cause analysis. To increase performance, IT pros need agile solutions that can redirect applications and reallocate storage and computing resources to ensure a reliable, scalable platform. Furthermore, to meet or exceed service level agreements (SLA), IT experts need to deliver real time reports and trend analysis that will enable the IT team to be proactive, identify maintenance requirements, and document the business impact.
A Closer Look
Take for example an IT project we were recently working on with an international manufacturer of defense systems, whose equipment often integrates with high-performance computing platforms. As part of a client contract, their team had been asked to develop and install a Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), a pre-loaded and pre-configured server rack consisting of hardware and software for compute, storage, networking, virtualization, containers, data streaming components and a range of other new technologies. A crucial part of the project included having tools that would ensure consistent performance and reliability over time.
The vendor needed a way to evaluate the entire HCI system (all software applications, networking, and infrastructure components) that would recognize problems in real-time, isolate root causes, identify trends and foresee impending issues before they caused performance degradation and downtime. Furthermore, they needed a solution that displayed the “health status” for each business process so that system administrators could recognize the operational implications of various problems, and assign the right resources to solve the most critical issues.
How to Monitor The Entire IT System and Associate Each Layer of Technology To Individual Business Processes?
Traditional infrastructure and operations (I&O) tools alone lack the comprehensive coverage of these various IT domains – applications, Big Data, operating systems, database, storage, compute, security, networking, etc. So, while HCI architectures will accelerate implementation by simplifying storage and hardware decisions, by itself an HCI approach lacks the required performance monitoring and analytics of software layers, where 70-80% of performance problems occur.
Without an end-to-end view of the entire IT system, and an understanding of how different technology layers impact one another, administrators must scramble to trace the propagation of problems (cause-and-effect). This leads to poor first-time-fix rates (FTF), more no-trouble-found events (NTF), and longer meantime-to-repair (MTTR).
With the growing complexity of IT environments, especially hybrid computing models (consisting of private Cloud, public Cloud, and on-premise), the need to solve the enterprise-level monitoring and analytics problem has become even greater.
What Can Be Done to Optimize complex IT Environments?
The only way IT experts can manage tech complexity, reduce costs, and get higher performance, is through a unified IT performance monitoring and analytics approach.
Unified IT performance monitoring delivers a consolidated view of overall service levels by evaluating all layers of the technology stack, including applications, Big Data, operating systems, database, storage, compute, security, networking, Cloud, Edge, and IoT/IIoT devices.
Unified IT performance analytics provides reports that reveal dependencies, correlations, and trends of operational issues before they happen. This approach essentially provides an early warning system to problems, along with corrective action tools that quickly isolate defects and identify root causes. As a result, organizations can capture a real-time picture of the complete IT stack and ensure that service levels are consistent with contractual agreements.
Keeping this in mind, lets go back to our customer example above. Our defense systems manufacturer IT Operations team had three potential paths worth consideration.
Three Potential Paths to Victory
The first path was a combination of built-in (often packaged with infrastructure devices and software applications) and 3rd party monitoring tools (commercial performance monitoring tools) together with a layer of custom code written on top to integrate the pieces, implement business rules, and provide the high-level dashboard that was required.
A “combo pack solution” like this however would be very time consuming, risky, and expensive for the customer. In addition, it would require an ongoing consulting agreement with the vendor to ensure the custom code continued to perform as expected.
The second path was to implement an integrated monitoring suite from one of the large software vendors. A ‘suite solution’ looked good at first but in the end was too expensive and limiting because each IT layer would require purchasing and managing a separate software module. All too often though critical monitoring features like these were not going to be available until the “next” release.
IT team’s third option was the unified IT and operations performance monitoring and analytics solution from Centerity.
Be on The Right Path
Centerity was considered cost effective because a single platform covered all technology layers (hardware and software), and pricing was not based on separate modules but on the number of metrics (or KPIs) that needed to be monitored.
The technology evaluations also revealed that Centerity’s risk profile was low because the system was up and running within a matter of hours, including monitoring and root cause analysis. Indeed, by the end of a week-long test the entire HCI system was being optimized based on Centerity’s analytics and trend reports.
After implementing Centerity’s end-to-end IT performance monitoring and analytics platform, our client and his customer finally had real-time access to critical information that allowed them to manage and improve service levels and customer satisfaction.
Since implementing Centerity, reports show that the fault isolation and root cause analysis capabilities have reduced MTTR on the HCI system by as much as 80% over previous systems.
Centerity’s unified software appliance was the only solution that could cover the entire IT stack on the Hyperconverged system and let our customer experience the performance and reliability they expected.
For further information or questions about how to improve IT performance via unified IT performance analytics solution, please schedule a demo for how Centerity can help with your IT needs.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/shutterstock_565457287-e1513028538400.jpg533800Marty Pejkohttps://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Centerity-Logo-1.pngMarty Pejko2017-12-11 21:42:522017-12-11 21:42:52Hyperconvergence Only Solves Half the Problem// Xperts Tips Series
“Enterprise analytics provides speed and accuracy, which means getting the information needed to make a decision in a matter of minutes, not hours. It means being able to fix performance issues before users notice there’s a problem”
How to Implement a successful Proactive IT strategy? Prerequisite to be proactive is seeing the entire IT environment. There are 3 main guidelines in order to get there:
The user has information when and where he needs it.
The user discovers new insights via easy-to-consume Visualized interface.
The user is part of a complex, extensive and interconnected software landscape (Vs. looking at silos of data).
The only way IT experts can satisfy each prerequisite and have an immediate, clear visibility to their entire IT stack is via Unified Performance Analytics Platform. Such platforms is designed to be flexible and is already geared to Auto Discover what’s going on your entire IT environment, within the very first day, every day.
This is another way how a Unified IT Performance Analytics solution ensures speed, which is key value for any IT Operation success. How proactive an IT expert can be is an indication of the completeness and the flexibility of the solution they have.
Centerity’s award winning software provides a unified enterprise-class IT performance analytics platform that improves performance and reliability of business services to ensure availability of critical systems. By delivering a consolidated view across all layers of the technology stack including, applications, Big Data, operating systems, database, storage, compute, security, networking, Cloud, Edge, and IoT/IIoT devices, Centerity provides an early warning of performance issues along with corrective action tools to quickly isolate faults and identify root causes.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/performance-1-1.jpg12801920Marty Pejkohttps://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Centerity-Logo-1.pngMarty Pejko2017-11-03 14:08:272017-11-03 14:08:27Implementing Successful Proactive IT Performance Strategy
Enterprise service is not operationally ready until its entire IT stack is analyzed in a comprehensive and accurate way.
The only cost-effective way to do it is through a Unified Performance Analytics Platform. Such methodology is unique as it is built as one piece of a software that goes beyond collecting and organizing data alone. It provides an intuitive visualization and clear context for the information gathered.
Having such platform reduces MTTR and overheads and expands the real time visibility that is brought to your management dashboard, 24X7. Together with it’s inherited Flexibility and easy configuration set up, business units ensure a dramatic and immediate performance improvement together with overall reduced costs.
How well IT experts address contradicting demands is an indication of the completeness of the software solution the have. How quickly IT pros adapt to change is a matter of the flexibility of their product. How rapidly they identify root causes and generate reports is an indication of the value of their product (reduces MTTR). How fast they to satisfy business needs is a matter of what Analytics platform they have.
Centerity’s award winning software provides a unified enterprise-class IT performance analytics platform that improves performance and reliability of business services to ensure availability of critical systems. By delivering a consolidated view across all layers of the technology stack including, applications, Big Data, operating systems, database, storage, compute, security, networking, Cloud, Edge, and IoT/IIoT devices, Centerity provides an early warning of performance issues along with corrective action tools to quickly isolate faults and identify root causes.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/satisfaction.jpg9431920Marty Pejkohttps://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Centerity-Logo-1.pngMarty Pejko2017-11-03 14:07:502017-11-03 14:07:50Overcoming Conflicting Demands for Improved Performance and Reduced Costs in IT Operations
We asked Centerity’s experts to recommend on three must-have features to ensure a cost-effective IT operations performance. We’ll be talking more about why you should put those features in priority in our next E-journal. For now, here are the three things you are encouraged to keep in mind:
We asked Centerity’s experts to recommend on three must-have features to ensure a cost-effective IT operations performance. We’ll be talking more about why you should put those features in priority in our next E-journal. For now, here are the three things you are encouraged to keep in mind:
Key value for any Performance Analytics software solution is how it ensures SPEED. How fast you setup new technology is an indication of the completeness of the solution. How quickly you adapt to IT changes is an indication of the flexibility of your product.How rapidly you identify root causes and generate reports is an indication of the value of your product (reduces MTTR).
How fast are you to satisfy your business needs is a matter of what Analytics platform you have.
There are many important characteristics of a good monitoring and Performance software solution. If I have to chose three features only, here are the ones to ensure a rapid and reliable software solution for IT Operations teams:
Service Level Reporting – Advanced SLA reports and Performance templates that ensure successful operation of Applications on your platform, along with the rest of the IT and business systems.
Automated Discovery that detects and identify components (Software and Hardware), categorize, normalize and assess metrics, together with Topology and Dependency Maps to provide a real time and consistent map of your business data. Detecting and fixing potential performance issues before customers are affected is critical for improving service levels and CSAT.
Ease-of-Use and Deployment Flexibility with Integrated Configuration Management Database (“CMDB”) – Integrated CMDB provides effective incident remediation, discovery, storage and tracking of configuration information for each element.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/speed1.jpg12031920Marty Pejkohttps://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Centerity-Logo-1.pngMarty Pejko2017-11-02 13:25:222017-11-02 13:25:22Three features that matter most for IT pros to drive business rapidly and effectively
Many hardware vendors with classic IT practices in servers, storage, networking, converged and hyperconverged infrastructures have their own tool(s) to collect performance data from its own equipment to assess performance and effect management. The same can be said for IoT/IIoT vendors with end-point devices like sensors and actuators as well as more complex infrastructures and systems involved in communications, energy, utility and smart city applications.
The common limitation across all these vendors is that true systemic analytics on performance is not possible due to the fact that many third party components are involved in these deliverables are not controlled by the principal vendor so data captured will be either inconsistent or non-existent. Furthermore, when these Operational Technologies (OT) need to be connected to Information Technologies (IT) for comprehensive views of systemic performance with a business context, these correlated views across OT and IT systems are currently impossible. Equipment vendors are motivated to manage and monitor its own equipment but not the other 3rd party equipment and applications in the system. First, it’s not their immediate concern and second, it’s just too hard with the number of third-parties involved now and there’s more to come. Due to this, true systemic analytics is not possible and systems are operationally too complex with unacceptably high downtime and high operational expenses due to a lack of systemic automation and controls.
What’s an OEM to do?
Centerity has a purpose built, unified platform that is device/equipment/application agnostic to collect and analyze systemic data from any source creating actionable, systemic intelligence. We have plugin methodologies that allow for the rapid extension of coverage to new or novel technologies. This is essentially an abstraction layer between the devices and the collection methodologies to quickly provided end-to-end coverage and maintain that coverage in these dynamic environments. Moreover, the ability to correlate systemic information across the OT and IT layers gives customers the business intelligence and business value they seek from these investments.
Centerity can create a tight integration with your proprietary equipment and provide cross-correlation of your data with other third-party data transforming siloed data into real systemic information. And, we can do it quickly due to our award-winning, purpose-built, unified platform! Through Centerity, once all these disparate device and applications are tied together, we can help you create real business value while reducing operational complexity, MTTR, and OPEX. This dynamic reduces sales friction and creates a short time-to-value for your customers all leading to quicker follow-on and larger deals.
Centerity’s an award winning unified enterprise-class IT Performance Analytics Platform that improves Performance and Reliability of business services to ensure availability of critical systems. By delivering a consolidated view across all layers of the technology stack, including, applications, big data, operating systems, database, storage, compute, security, networking, cloud, edge AND IoT/IIoT devices, Centerity provides an early warning of performance issues along with corrective action tools to quickly isolate faults and identify root causes.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/oem.jpeg12801920Marty Pejkohttps://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Centerity-Logo-1.pngMarty Pejko2017-10-20 20:42:412017-10-20 20:42:41OEM with Centerity
Imagine you’re on the highway, nowhere near a service station, and your car starts making a strange sound—would you rather have an alert tell you there’s a spark plug misfiring or a gauge showing your engine overheating?
Probably both, but if you’re like me and you have no idea what a spark plug misfiring might mean for your car, I’d bet the first thing you’d want to know is that your engine is overheating, so you can turn your car off or go easy on the AC. You need to know what impact an issue is having on your overall process (driving, living, not being eaten by wolves after abandoning your car, etc.) so you can take actions to minimize potential damage. Save the misfiring spark plug for when you get to a service station outside of wolf country.
http://meshvox.tumblr.com/post/14520062429
This is the basic thrust of Business Service Management (BSM) as an IT strategy. BSM assumes that IT exists to drive business and therefore the impact technological issues have on critical business processes should be the starting point for IT Operations. Rather than taking a siloed, techno-centric approach to IT, BSM favors a holistic, business service-centric strategy.
Great idea, right? Simple enough? And yet, this simple idea has proved hard to implement in the past. As I will show, this difficulty has led many early BSM adopters to abandon their attempts after not realizing the results they were promised and many more to never attempt BSM in the first place.
Off to a Rough Start
For BSM to work and accurately reflect the health of the business, performance monitoring must be holistic, extending across all IT assets. Makes sense—if all the technologies used by an organization exist to drive the business, then getting only a partial picture of the technology would necessarily mean getting only a partial picture of the business. Therefore, the first step to implementing BSM is to find a tool that can collect performance data from all your technologies—not just infrastructure and the network. Not surprisingly, legacy software vendors led the charge in offering the end-to-end monitoring solutions necessary for BSM. They all promised the demise of siloed IT operations, but one after another proved too unwieldy, complex, and expensive. The cost and pain of managing the IT environment became the cost and pain of managing the IT management tool.
Because these legacy solutions comprised tools and functionalities gained through corporate acquisition vs. in-house development, the end-user was presented with a suite of tools to choose from, few of which were purpose-built to work together and all of which required individual installation, integration, and maintenance. Deployments stretched on for months, even years, and once in place, the complexity of using and maintaining the tools required so many dedicated staff members that rising operating expenses eclipsed any savings that might have been realized from implementing BSM in the first place.
Even worse, the complexity of the tools and inability of the various modules to play nicely together made achieving true BSM impossible anyway, as data and alerts from the modules covering each technology layer could not be correlated in real-time, making overall business service status chronically inaccurate.
With these practical barriers to success, it’s no wonder that after the better part of a decade since legacy BSM solutions became available, the majority of adopters have either displaced their legacy solutions altogether or added more tools to cover gaps in functionality, too daunted by the prospect of having to rip out a tool that required so large an investment in time and money to set up in the first place. Neither should it come as any surprise that their experiences have scared off so many from attempting BSM.
Learning from Failure: A New Hope (and a Shameless Plug)
Centerity is pretty much Luke Skywalker [Full Stop]
Just as Luke grew up in the shadow of the Empire, only to rise up and instill hope for a better future in a beleaguered Republic, Centerity uses badass Jedi tricks to bring BSM to IT Ops teams everywhere! And by “Jedi tricks”, I, of course, mean a unified architecture and codeless plugin methodology for integrating with new technologies.
As we’ve learned above, for BSM to succeed in accurately reflecting the overall health of the business, a monitoring solution must satisfy two points: 1.) It must be able to extend to all IT assets leveraged by an organization and 2.) It must be able to correlate data from those assets in real-time for cross-domain impact analysis and alerting.
Centerity was purpose-built as a platform, not an amalgamation of tools, for delivering end-to-end performance monitoring analytics in a single software appliance. This means fast deployments and virtually no maintenance because there is only one piece of software to install and maintain. Say goodbye to tortuous multi-month/quarter deployments and say hello to immediate results and low total cost of ownership (TCO)!
Crucially, Centerity is the most extensible monitoring solution available! Most tools only support agent-based or agentless monitoring. Centerity’s platform supports both because we know that no two IT environments are the same and you need a solution that can meet the varying and exacting demands of today’s dynamic data center environments. Additionally, the platform boasts hundreds of custom scripts, API integrations, and more to make sure there is never a gap in our support. This is why our solution is being used to monitor everything from environmental equipment for the Internet of Things (IoT) to Big Data and In-memory processing solutions like Hadoop and SAP HANA on converged and hyper-converged platforms.
And because all of this functionality is contained in a single appliance, there is no need to correlate data between separate modules, allowing performance analytics to be distributed across the platform immediately and cross-domain analysis to occur in real-time.
BSM Nirvana
This is true BSM. We call it BSM Nirvana: a single dial representing the service availability of your most critical business services. In essence, a single pane of glass for viewing your entire business. Because you don’t just want to know if there’s a discard error on a router—you want to know immediately what that means for your business. It’s time to stop worrying about technology and start growing your business!
Centerity’s an award winning unified enterprise-class IT Performance Analytics Platform that improves Performance and Reliability of business services to ensure availability of critical systems. By delivering a consolidated view across all layers of the technology stack, including, applications, big data, operating systems, database, storage, compute, security, networking, cloud, edge AND IoT/IIoT devices, Centerity provides an early warning of performance issues along with corrective action tools to quickly isolate faults and identify root causes.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/AdobeStock_371200508-1030x687-1.jpg6871030Marty Pejkohttps://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Centerity-Logo-1.pngMarty Pejko2017-10-13 16:54:092021-02-26 13:19:21Unlock the True Value of Business Service Management!
