Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 3-16.
A priori analytics application for diagnosis and preventive actions
Big Data Analytics for IT/Operations
Since the days of mainframes, IT was always about year-on-year investments on
infrastructure, software, skilled people, and process standardizations. IT was primarily
responsible to provide a robust platform to support a seven-day per week 9AM to 9PM
business model. If the enterprise was running a global business with geographically
diverse operations, then the scale of IT operations increased multifold.
First the Internet and then online channels changed the way the IT operations
were managed. The business model suddenly shifted to 24 hour/seven days a week,
covering all possible time zones. The IT professionals started to use laptops, tablet PCs,
and smart devices to interact with enterprise systems wherever and whenever they want.
These additional access channels also put a lot of strain on IT standard access policies
and controls, and suddenly data privacy and security became a hot topic agenda in CIO
discussions.
Hardware and software vendors took advantage of these changing business models
and started doing rapid product innovations; it was not uncommon to see multiple
vendor products installed in the same enterprise across different lines of businesses. And
quite predictably year-on-year IT investment budget kept going up and up.
However, technology evolutions and process maturity started challenging the
conventional IT approaches: cloud models, software as a service models (SaaS), hosted
service offering models, etc., began to optimize the cost and at the same time provided lot
of flexibility on vendor products. It was no longer a single vendor lock-in scenario, rather
IT programs evolved to align to business optimization.
