The Surgient Virtual Automation Platform™

The Challenge: The IT Service Delivery Gap
The Solution: Self-Service Provisioning for Dynamic Data Centers
Additional Resources

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The IT Service Delivery Gap

“It takes us on average 14 days, and up to 23 days, to provision a single VM for our end users…”
~IT, Major Global Professional Services Firm

“We have a 30-day backlog of service requests that continues to grow.”
~IT, Global Hotel Management Firm

“It takes us weeks to deploy our standard 200-server configuration, inhibiting our ability to test the scalability of our system.”
~IT, Major Data and Information Management Company

Despite flat and even shrinking IT budgets, the demand for complex services and infrastructure to support business initiatives continues to increase, creating a critical service delivery gap between available IT resources and the ever-growing demand. This gap is now materially impacting the enterprise with lengthy and missed delivery SLAs, growing request backlogs, and expensive resource sprawl.

What's causing the gap?

• Large user base, often globally distributed
• Large number of supported services/applications
• Increasing service complexity & update frequency
• Growing compliance and governance pressures

More organizations than ever are investing in virtualization in an effort to consolidate servers, centralize resources, and reduce operational costs, and they’re already seeing some significant efficiency gains. However, they’re also finding it challenging to effectively manage the virtualized infrastructure to provide complex, user-centric services with their limited staff and resources. They’re in need of a way to delegate administrative responsibilities and speed delivery while maintaining control of the infrastructure and enforcing compliance.

In many cases today, IT Operations supports user resource and service requests through a manual or semi-automated process. Users submit requests via phone, email, or possibly a trouble ticketing system. Often there is not sufficient understanding by the user of what is required of IT to support the request – resulting in a time-consuming iterative dialogue. Once the requirements are understood, IT must find, recover, or purchase the needed systems and configure the infrastructure for delivery to the user, which takes even more time. Next, the resource is delivered to the user, and there are typically problems that require some degree of rework before the request can be considered complete. Afterwards, when the desired initiative has been finished, the hardware is not always recovered due to a lack of IT resources, priority, process discipline, or user unwillingness to release these resources, contributing to server and VM sprawl. This manual approach does not scale, takes too much IT Operations effort, and does not meet the needs of users.

How does IT simultaneously cut its fundamental operating cost structure and increase its overall value to the business? While there’s no silver bullet that can transform an enterprise overnight, many companies today are realizing rapid and significant ROI made possible by self-service infrastructure delivery.

Self-Service Solution Requirements – Users

• Easy to access & use
• Eliminates request bottlenecks
• Delivers services in the appropriate context
• Enables users to get what they need, when they need it

Self-Service Solution Requirements – Administrators

• Policy-driven with administrative controls
• Minimal administrator operating involvement
• Delegation of specific activities to users
• Needs to leverage existing IT investments

Existing solutions, such as script-based data center automation platform, still reveal significant drawbacks in practice, particularly around VM sprawl, inefficient utilization of resource pools, and unnecessary labor overhead. Companies have been looking for a platform that combines robust infrastructure automation capabilities, policy-driven self-service resource access for users, and automated enforcement of IT policies. A proven platform with all of those capabilities is available today:

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Self-Service Provisioning for Dynamic Data Centers

The Surgient Virtual Automation Platform™ streamlines the administration of infrastructure delivery, enables end users with just-in-time self-service provisioning, and delivers user-centric services while abstracting complexity.

Automated, Self-Managed IT Service Delivery

• Automate provisioning & recovery of complex, mixed virtual / physical services
• Optimize utilization of IT infrastructure and amplify consolidation benefits
• Materially reduce capital and operating expenses beyond virtualization alone

Just-in-Time Self-Service Provisioning

• Deliver pre-approved services through a self-service portal, on-demand & with guaranteed reservations
• Easily deliver the resources your business users need, exactly when they need them
• Fully govern and control infrastructure delivery with IT-defined policies and processes

Scalable, User-Centric Services

• Define reusable services to speed provisioning, simplify delivery, and support standards
• Manage resources (server, network, storage) while abstracting complexity, scaling easily from the department to the enterprise
• Align with business needs and enable users with a rich self-service experience

With Surgient self-service automation, IT can drastically reduce service delivery times and minimize administrative effort, enabling them to: exceed delivery SLAs, eliminate backlogs of service requests, reign in and prevent resource sprawl, and enforce standards.

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Additional Resources

• Download the Surgient Platform Datasheet