Terabytes, Petabytes and now Zetabytes worth of files? Need to manage your chaos? Learning how to tame the information deluge of files - Unstructured and Semi-Structured Data. Like most IT professionals, you're being challenged to keep up with the rapid growth of file-based data in file shares, home directories and unstructured data repositories across your enterprise. You've probably been tasked to make that data more accessible to an increasingly mobile workforce - while controlling costs and ensuring that your security policies are enforced. Gartner recently forecasted a number of developments that will significantly impact the IT function in years to come, spanning mobile device management, hybrid cloud integration and software-defined networking. As these disruptive technologies continue to mature, IT is well-positioned to drive overall corporate success, enabling organizations’ innovative capabilities to really shine through. What suggestions do you have or can provide? What solution direction would you like to see?

1. IT PAIN POINTS THAT HAVE CURRENT SOLUTIONS
The IT department isn't traditionally perceived as the hub for organizational
innovation and growth, but it’s slowly getting there.
Gartner recently forecasted a number of developments that will significantly
impact the IT function in years to come, spanning mobile device management,
hybrid cloud integration and software-defined networking. As these disruptive
technologies continue to mature, IT is well-positioned to drive overall corporate
success, enabling organizations’ innovative capabilities to really shine through.
See also: IT's Losing Battle Against Cloud Adoption
Assimilating these new technologies won't come easy, however. Lots of time and
resources must be dedicated to fine-tuning these tools for unique IT
environments—and that’s on top of existing “keep-the-lights-on” IT maintenance.
Efficient IT management will be a key challenge over the next year, and
enterprises will have to approach it much more strategically if they’re to realize
the benefits of next-generation technologies.
I foresee two major developments emerging in 2014 to improve IT management:
The application of big data to internal IT processes, and an evolution of the
operations manager (OM). Both trends reflect more proactive IT service
management strategies, which I believe will unlock the potential of disruptive
enterprise technology.
Big Data for Internal Processes
Big data is widely recognized as a valuable tool to help understand customer
behavior, particularly among the manufacturing, retail and financial sectors. We
know, as an industry, that turning data into decisions is a powerful concept, so
why should it be used exclusively for external stakeholders?

2. IT PAIN POINTS THAT HAVE CURRENT SOLUTIONS
In 2014, organizations will open up a whole new playing field for big data,
turning predictive analytics inward and applying it within the IT function to track
where operational incidents happen most frequently. The real value here is that it
will enable IT and network admins to track patterns in the operating
environment and, based on those patterns, create more accurate thresholds for
recurring issues or events. As a result, businesses can better predict and perhaps
prevent IT incidents before they happen, ensuring better overall uptime and
performance.
See also: DevOps: The Future Of DIY IT?
Data is everywhere, so collecting it is perhaps the easiest part. The challenge is
translating that data into actionable knowledge.
All the data available to us means nothing if it’s not concentrated, sorted and
organized in a way that’s useful to create meaningful insights or inform decision
making. Integrating analytics into an IT management console can make this a
more seamless process, especially when the system can automatically respond to
threshold alerts and deploy a corresponding action, all before the incident even
occurs.
Resource availability and performance are two obvious benefits of big data
analytics in IT. By analyzing where issues occur in the network or IT
infrastructure, organizations can discover which problems need to be addressed,
thereby reducing instances of performance degradation and bandwidth overconsumption, for example.
More important, though, is the speed at which these results can occur. As an
example, let’s take a look at the financial services market and the management of
trading applications. Without the aid of big data analytics, a system administrator
might take up to an hour to figure out why a new trade failed to execute.

3. IT PAIN POINTS THAT HAVE CURRENT SOLUTIONS
Meanwhile, the trade has decreased in value and the revenue opportunity is lost,
all because of a slow infrastructure analysis process. With greater volumes of
transactions and more decisions made within compressed timeframes, admins
can collect enough data to address the factors that cause slow or failed
transactions, and eventually prevent them from happening at all.
Evolution of the Operations Manager
IT can—and should—prepare their systems for events that are easy to predict; for
example, preparing websites with extra capacity during regular or expected
periods of peak traffic (and they can also address recurring issues, such as the
financial trade execution).
But with the complexity of today’s converged infrastructures, there will always be
unexpected circumstances and new problems that arise. Here is where the
operations manager (OM) will play a significant role.
See also: More Big Data Is Better, But Good Luck Understanding
It All
Traditionally, OMs were confined to break-fix roles, responsible only for reacting
to these unpredictable problems as they arose in an IT environment. These
expectations will evolve as cloud usage ramps up and 60% of server
workloads are virtualized by the end of 2014. The rate of incoming service
requests will increase exponentially, so managing those incidents will have to be
much more systematic.
Under this increased pressure, we’ll begin to see the OM’s role expand beyond
purely break-fix tasks to include more application support, including resource
procurement and provisioning. This might require, for instance, adding more
virtual machines, bandwidth, CPU or memory in response to infrastructure

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capacity shortages. Moving away from mere execution, the OM will become more
of a strategic contributor—a resource manager and critical business unit.
For the next-generation OM, automation will be a necessary tool. Availability
monitoring and performance assurance in today’s IT landscape simply cannot be
accomplished by human efforts alone, and automation gives the OM a method to
provision on demand. By setting triggers that correspond to automated actions,
the operations team can track usage in real-time, which is supported by
automation that increases resources if and when they are needed.
As IT infrastructure becomes increasingly dynamic, it’s critical that operations
stay ahead of the curve. Backed by unified monitoring and automation tools, the
OM can move from a reactive role into more proactive management, ensuring
that growing volumes of IT issues are responded to immediately. As a result, they
can significantly free up time to focus on integrating the technologies of
tomorrow and driving true business innovation.
IT Moves Off The Bench And Onto The
Playing Field
See also: The Key ForHadoop Adoption: Learning To Make Big
Data Small
As innovative technologies bombard the enterprise, IT management has to keep
up the pace—in fact, its performance will dictate whether new technologies can be
accommodated at all.
Improving IT efficiency has been an enduring goal on most organizations’
agendas, but I think our industry’s mentality around efficiency is finally
beginning to shift. It’s no longer about providing the nuts and bolts when

5. IT PAIN POINTS THAT HAVE CURRENT SOLUTIONS
something goes awry. Now, it’s about elevating IT’s position within an
organization in order to take a more strategic approach.
Whether it’s planning ahead of breakage issues, or ensuring resources are in
place when they’re needed, the IT function is going to have to step up to the plate.
The good news is, they won’t have to do it alone. As quickly as disruptive
technologies are evolving, so are back-end management technologies. Together,
with IT as a tactical leader and automation in support, 2014 should see a boom in
disruptive capabilities that 2013 had yet to show.