Monitor entry point: Enhance service management through superior visibility and tracking

IBM model—based on five entry points―helps organizations to implement service management

Tivoli Beat. A weekly IBM service management perspective As organizations move to address customer and client needs more effectively, one powerful approach available to them is service management. By shifting their focus specifically to services, and refining those services to map as closely as possible to what customers need (and in many cases, specifically request), a superior business outcome can be achieved.

Because each organization is driven by its own context, however, moving forward with service management ideals can be a challenging matter. Best practices frameworks such as ITIL (the Information Technology Infrastructure Library) help, yet do not offer a clear, straightforward procedural path either. No two organizations will have identical services, resources, customers or customer requirements; no two, therefore, can follow exactly the same path in pursuing service management.

For this reason, IBM has developed a new model specifically intended to help organizations translate the abstract theory of service management into practical reality in a clean, efficient and cost-effective way. This model describes five entry points: Discover, Monitor, Protect, Industrialize and Integrate. Organizations can select whichever entry points seem best suited to their service management needs, implementing any or all of the entry points in any order. Furthermore, each entry point is also divided into various projects which are similarly modular.

In this way, organizations can arrive at a custom fit—a service management implementation through which they can achieve forward progress quickly and effectively. How quickly? IBM estimates that in many cases, substantial, quantifiable improvement will require only one business quarter.

Monitor: Get better business results through better visibility

One such entry point, for instance, is Monitor. Essentially, Monitor concerns the question of service performance and visibility throughout the business, as perceived from both technological and business standpoints. The idea here is to measure (in real time, if possible) how services are performing, quantify that performance, and in this way achieve the actionable intelligence required to make whatever adjustments are needed to optimize the business outcome.

Monitor is divided into five possible projects. The first of these, User Activity Monitoring, spotlights security. This is an increasing concern for many organizations, as the costs of security breaches rise and the range of threats becomes more sophisticated; one such emerging threat is the possibility of abuse by trusted insiders. Employees whose jobs involve special access privileges can abuse (and in some highly publicized cases, have abused) those privileges in different ways, such as accessing, compromising or copying core business data.

Toward addressing this situation, organizations need new solutions and strategies aimed at improving security without diminishing productivity. Through the User Activity Monitoring project, organizations can begin asking and answering questions such as: How can we better understand business, policy and regulatory requirements? How can we establish the risk rating of different systems and devices? How can we deploy new solutions intended to monitor users and ensure that user behavior falls within security protocols?

IBM offers both solutions and services to help answer those questions. The IBM Global Technology Services (GTS) Risk Assessment offering, for instance, can help reveal and quantify different forms of business risk pertinent to user activity. And solutions such as IBM Tivoli Compliance Insight Manager can deliver comprehensive employee monitoring in a lightweight architecture that has minimal impact on productivity, yet also generates reports helpful for establishing employee adherence with both regulations and internal security protocols.

Improve composite applications and event performance management

Another project within Monitor, SOA Composite Application Performance, tackles composite applications. As organizations increasingly turn to SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) as a technical implementation of service management philosophy, they have experienced new challenges as a result. Specifically, because composite applications involve many different resources (systems, data and others) within the IT infrastructure, tracking their performance and isolating their technical problems can be complex. And as problem resolution becomes more complex, it also becomes slower and more costly.

Through the SOA Composite Application Performance project, these issues are directly addressed. Organizations can improve application performance and availability; reduce costs across operations, support and development; and determine resource consumption patterns by analyzing resource trends using historical performance information.

Naturally, IBM offers key services and solutions designed to fulfill these many goals. Consider IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for SOA Platform, for instance—a solution which focuses specifically on establishing the root cause of technical issues in even the most complex SOA applications. Similarly, IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager helps by federating isolated identity domains into a central pool and allowing any invoking service to poll it, SOA-style, for authentication and validation functions (particularly helpful to organizations interested in offering services to customers and clients outside company walls). And in the area of services, IBM GTS offers SOA Infrastructure Consulting to help suggest, create, enhance or revamp SOA implementations in many contexts.

A third project within the Monitor entry point is Event and Performance Management. Here, the focus is on managing problematic events in an optimal way to yield the best business value. Service desks, for instance, often serve as a first point of call for customers or users with technical issues, yet because of disparate resources such as management tools, network operations centers or datacenters, their response is suboptimal—the results being lower satisfaction levels and higher time-to-problem-resolution.

A better approach would involve consolidated resource information, and improved visibility into even exceptionally complex infrastructures, via a single “pane of glass”—that is, a unified perspective into the overall business and technological service levels being provided. In this way, incident reporting, problem management and time-to-resolution would be streamlined, while operational costs would fall and asset ROI and customer satisfaction levels would both rise.

Just this approach can be implemented via IBM solutions such as the IBM Tivoli Netcool family, including solutions such as Netcool/OMNIbus and Netcool/Impact, which give organizations a bird’s eye view of the total network and help track and resolve technical issues in any desired level of detail—often before they can create a business impact, thus eliminating trouble tickets in many cases. And organizations looking for relevant services can turn to IBM GTS Tivoli QuickStart Services for Netcool/OMNIbus to go about acquiring a clean, efficient implementation and deployment process with Netcool—and a faster return on asset investment.

Spur regulation compliance and lock down user access rights

Policy and Regulatory Controls Monitoring is a fourth project within Monitor. For many organizations today, non-compliance with security controls, policies and government regulations can have truly daunting consequences. These regulations, which characterize and specify the monitoring and management of sensitive data, are no trivial matter; compliance with them must be achieved, or organizations can face stringent legal or fiscal penalties. Therefore, every effort must be made to eliminate the risk of a failed audit. Audit findings must be proactively anticipated, and problem areas must be proactively addressed. Risk exposure must be minimized by identifying and eliminating inefficient controls in place (both from the standpoint of external regulations and internal policies). And this must happen in a continual manner, through ongoing, automated monitoring and reporting.

IBM solutions pertinent to this project include IBM Tivoli Security Information and Event Manager, which can be used to collect security logs generated by different security assets, analyze them to detect security events, drive compliance initiatives and help respond in the event of an audit via a custom reporting engine. And from the IT development standpoint, this project can also be pursued via IBM Rational AppScan, a tool used to proactively anticipate and test many different attack vectors that might be utilized to create a security breach in internally developed software. Finally, IBM GTS Security Governance Services are available to verify that security is implemented and pursued via an appropriate governance model; also available are ISS Managed Security Services, a managed alternative for organizations looking to outsource this key IT responsibility.

The fifth and final project in Monitor is User Access Rights/User Lifecycle Management. Critical to maximizing the business value of virtually any service or data is ensuring that only the right users have access to it—and then only with the right privileges. As the total number of users in organizations rises, though, and in many cases services or data are being made available to people not employed by the organization at all (such as clients, customers and business partners), this challenge becomes more complicated than ever. Policies designed to meet that challenge help, but costs nevertheless often rise as core functions such as provisioning, de-provisioning and policy creation and modification require ever-increasing resources. And as user rights change during the course of their lifecycle, policies must change in parallel, reflecting new privileges which map to new business requirements and functions.

Toward simplifying this complexity, reducing these costs, and delivering improved security through optimized user access rights management, it is essential that organizations move toward a new strategy—one characterized by key features such as intelligent automation and consolidation. In this way, they can align their access solutions more closely with their business objectives, deliver rich access to services and data without introducing new possibilities of a breach, improve compliance adherence, and in short, drive the business bottom line.

Exactly this kind of consolidated automation is enabled via IBM Tivoli Identity Manager. This policy-driven tool utilizes automation to fortify controls relating to user access rights, thus helping to enhance security, fulfill business objectives and lower operational costs all at the same time. In the area of user lifecycle management, IBM Tivoli Access Manager allows administrators to create users, cluster them into logical groups and assign both users and groups appropriate privileges relating to data, services and other resources. And for organizations looking for consulting help, from proven experts with deep knowledge of identity/access topics, IBM GTS Identity and Access Management Services would be an excellent place to start.

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