Here’s a question to which we can now provide a pleasant answer: Should building resiliency into an IT system require heavy investment in resources, like expensive, new infrastructure or hiring a larger team of IT professionals? The answer: Absolutely not! Empowering local or remote teams may be all you need.
In this post, learn about the common problems businesses face due to an excess of centralization, and the new expectations businesses face empowering local teams and collaborating across multiple sites to build more resilience and punch into ITOM.
According to a recent Gartner analysis*, “New applications deployed in remote sites are increasing the need for application availability and infrastructure resiliency. However, many solutions marketed for remote-site deployments remain unaffordable for these scaled-down environments.”
Centreon EMS and its newly integrated Centreon Remote Server can help your organization strike the right balance between centralized control and local autonomy. Centreon Remote Server was designed to answer the very specific needs of multisite, delocalized and complex IT operations.
Read this post if:
- You manage multiple IT sites and teams in different countries and time zones
- You remotely or locally manage IT operations for critical systems in distant areas
- You’re a Managed IT Services Provider (MSP) needing to establish a transparent, effective, and SLA-compliant collaboration with a full portfolio of clients across a large territory.
Business Continuity in the Era of Centralized Systems
If centralized IT systems have been the answer to rationalizing ITOps investment for many years now, it’s been far from an optimal solution in terms of resilience and business continuity from a local perspective. Because centralization means just that: relying on a central team of experts and a set of tools to manage critical IT operations, regardless of where operations take place. Without a local perspective, organizations can put their business at risk with slower response, lack of local knowledge, and a less engaged, agile team.
On paper, sharing an IT system across several continents and a single access to global monitoring views, either through company headquarters or a NOC is a great idea. The reality is businesses with distributed operations encounter all sorts of situations that leave local teams disempowered to monitor and slow to react to issues when these teams sitting in the front lines are only waiting to be enabled to contribute to organizational agility and resilience.
“Enterprise IT architectures increasingly comprise smaller, geographically dispersed locations in remote and edge environments. I&O leaders must deploy purpose-built software to create highly available, resilient and cost-effective platforms for scaled-down virtualized remote office infrastructures.” Gartner, March 2018*
Popular Problems for Multinational Organizations, Critical Ops Enterprise & Large MSPs
Here are some of the most common situations preventing the full participation of local teams in business continuity plans:
- Network latency and outages: Yes, these still happen in 2018, and network outages still exist. Many organizations run critical operations in remote environments that do not necessarily benefit from the same infrastructure reliability. Local teams may be cut off from the centralized operating tools creating a risky business continuity blind spot.
- Unfamiliar environments: A range of discrepancies between the central and local environment may trigger all sorts of problems: unfamiliar monitoring tools, legacy infrastructure, differing practices or business user needs, compliance issues up to skill, time zones or language gaps.
- Tolerance to a certain degree of risk: Even in this digital day and age, you can waste precious time trying to fix problems remotely, but adding local redundancy for remote critical environments seems to be too expensive compared to the perceived risk.
- Phased maintenance: Centralization of tools means that even planned maintenance at the NOC or headquarters will cut off regional or remote sites. There’s no flexibility to shut down just a few sites as needed or phasing planned system shutdowns to limit as much as possible impact on users.
Increased Expectations: Centralized Agility, Local Resilience
No business wants to sit on their laurel when it comes to digital transformation. There’s always a next step to look forward to, accelerating the changes that will make operations more agile, resilient, and at the end of the day, more competitive.
Here are some of the new milestones some of your peers may be pursuing to combine resilience with agility into their ITOps:
- Share only what needs to be shared: sharing is in itself a good practice but there are also very good reasons not to share the full platform with remote teams, obviously it’s the case for MSPs, but it makes sense also for responsibility and security reasons, for example between headquarters and branches.
- Provide regional teams with their own independent local access to pooled resources, so they can work in full autonomy from the headquarters or NOC, without losing on the advantages of a centralized and holistic management of the IT system.
- Gain a deeper understanding of local teams’ specific needs, letting them determine the best means to serve their business users, and providing them with the monitoring tools and mapping views they need, when they need them.
- Leverage transparent collaboration as a new, distinctive competitive advantage. Seamless collaboration between geographically distributed teams is a priority for most businesses, but even more so for certain types of businesses. Intensified collaboration between central and remote teams allow for round-the-clock problem-solving in critical environments, where every second counts. Managed IT services providers can provide their clients with innovative flexible tools to actively collaborate and facilitate the supervision of service agreements –at zero additional cost to them.
Centreon EMS is Part of the Solution
Giving teams with the means and tools they need for local business continuity is now very easy thanks to Centreon Remote Server, a fresh new feature of the just-released 18.10 Centreon EMS version. Centreon Remote server provides local teams with independent access into shared, centralized resources, enabling them to perform their crucial duties even if they’re disconnected from the central server. It also allows teams to build their own mapping views for prompt action and local, just-in-time management.
Ask to see how Centreon Remote Server works.
Centreon Remote Server – Basic Specs
Distributed Monitoring Architecture
- Centreon Remote Server is an add-on available in the distributed architecture section of the Centreon solution, which also includes Centreon Central Server and Centreon Pollers.
- Centreon Central Server allows you to monitor the entire IT system.
- Centreon Remote Servers complement the central server, allowing for an independent regional monitoring perimeter.
- Centreon Pollers collect monitoring information from all points of the IT system, including in hard to reach areas (i.e. strong network latency, firewalls, etc.)
Resilience-Supporting Key Features
- Full synchronization of operations between central and remote servers.
- Full autonomy for the user of a remote server, allowing users to create their own independent, customized views.
- In the event of a network failure between the remote server and the central server, remote server users are not affected. The central server is automatically synchronized when the network is back in service.
Fully Integrated Solution
- Centreon Remote Server is a new, optional add-on which comes fully integrated within the Centreon solution.
- When installing a Centreon server, the user gets to determine what its role will be: Central Server, Remote Server or Poller.
- The full Remote Server feature is configurable in just a few clicks, thanks to its super user-friendly interface.
Centreon EMS and its unmatched Remote Server feature is your ticket for additional IT resiliency at virtually no additional cost. Ask us about it.
Want to learn more about Centreon Remote Server?
Join us at Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2018 on Nov. 26&27 in London.
- Get our Centreon’s sponsored-discount here to sign up.
- Be one of the first to win our limited edition of Fast & Agile surprise gift! Tell us you are attending Centreon’s theater session and collect it on that very day.
- Drop by the Centreon Booth anytime for a quick demo and speak with our co-founder or our sales and marketing leadership. To be sure of getting your dedicated 1:1 time, email communications@centreon.com to give us your preference.
*In “How to Increase Uptime With Scaled-Down Remote Office Infrastructure” Published: 28 March 2018 ID: G00351228; Analyst(s): John McArthur, Philip Dawson
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