How Big Data Analytics Can Optimize IT Performance

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IT businesses that aren't using big data analytics are missing out on their full potential.

Big data analytics is now a part of all business management and solutions. All departments, from sales to customer service, are using the power of big data analytics to harness its benefits. The IT department is no exception — it also faces issues like performance and budget pressures. So the IT department can also benefit from insights and improve performance. Traditional IT solutions focus on particular areas like security and networking, but that does not reveal the complete picture of the IT environment. Here, big data and analytics can help to gather all the data in a single place and get real insights of the entire IT landscape.

Big data analytics will give you the power to face any kind of problem in your IT business. It can also handle your internal operations. So, in short, big data analytics will improve the productivity level of your business, cut the extra costs incurred and streamline processes according to their priorities. (For more on how big data analytics can help in business, see Can Big Data Analytics Close the Business Intelligence Gap?)

What Is IT Performance?

Traditionally speaking, IT performance encompasses monitoring and measuring various performance metrics that are relevant to the field. This is basically done in order to assess the performance of the infrastructure, operations and management of an IT business. Furthermore, IT performance has several other categories, such as:

  • Network performance
  • Application performance
  • System performance
  • Business transaction performance

How IT Performance Is Measured

Measurement of IT performance has always been a major concern because of the level of competition. Nowadays, every organization has a major role for IT, but having IT at the heart of your business is different from keeping it operational within the right costs and performance levels. Performance should be stable and unaffected from all kinds of changes in the environment, something which is very common in today’s ever-changing world. It is simply not acceptable anymore to wait until the customer complains about a situation, as that can be an indication of losing business. Nowadays, ideally all problems should solve themselves before any breakdown happens.

So, traditional IT businesses use different tools for every different feature, in order to optimize each segment individually. But this is not so simple to accomplish, as coordination between these different tools is very important for getting an overall view. Since these tools measure the parameters by continued scans or working on the software’s environment, they report in their own ways, which can be hard to sort through. In traditional IT, all tools are present to measure the infrastructure. They are capable enough to deal with what has happened already, rather than that which is more dynamic and complex in nature. The traditional IT tools help in monitoring the services in an infrastructural setup. They can also work on vast amounts of data, but are challenged in terms of creating a fully synchronized insight about the performance of IT infrastructure. However, to manage the IT network in a proactive manner, developers require analytical, logical and real-time data. So to measure the performance and carry out analysis in a proper manner, modern tools are focusing more on the application layer, which adds different types of metrics and sources of heavy data. (For more on real-time data, see Weighing the Pros and Cons of Real-Time Big Data Analytics.)

Generally, IT companies pay for a lot of solutions to monitor performance, but these solutions normally monitor only a specific segment of the whole business. Some of the key features used by IT businesses to measure performance are antivirus service administration systems, dependency mapping with respect to every application, managing the entire network and monitoring the operational performance which revolves around data.

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What Are the Current Performance Parameters?

Currently, many different types of parameters are used to check the performance of any business in the IT industry. The most important ones are:

  • Monitoring and controlling the administration
  • Analytics and logical performance
  • Runtime performance
  • Real-time performance
  • Security in every level
  • Self-resolving capability

What Are the Drawbacks in Current Methodology?

The key drawbacks that exist in the present methods not only affect costs, but also productivity. Individual solutions rely solely on what they know, without any idea of what they are lacking. This can lead to:

  • Major issues in security
  • Gaps in coverage area
  • Communication gaps
  • Dissimilarity in reports
  • Heavy increase of outages
  • Increase in time taken to resolve outages

How Big Data and Analytics Can Help

To avoid any of the situations mentioned above, big data brings all the individual reports together from various sources and provides a continuous flow of ETL. Here, ETL is the abbreviation of a process of three steps: extract, transform and load. Big data has the capability to process all the data with the help of very intricate algorithms on a real-time basis. It also makes use of an advanced form of analytics, linear scalability and high rate of performance. After completion, it provides highly accurate results.

The combination of big data, IT network and analytics is called the IT operation analytics sector. If the IT companies deploy this sector in the center of their architecture, then monitoring the complex and important IT applications and services will become very easy. This platform will help the developers in making sense of all data in a reliable and durable way.

Let’s take a look at a few more uses of this sector to optimize your IT services in this competitive market:

  • The main use will be real-time monitoring of your IT infrastructure, which includes all different types of mapping done between the hardware and software in the service network. A real-time overview of the performance of your IT environment will help to improve the quality of the end user experience.
  • It will help you to find the root cause of problems faced by your IT infrastructure on a real-time basis. Those problems which take a lot of time to resolve can be handled automatically and there will be a warning before any such problem occurs. Nowadays, a lot of talented and expensive strategists are required to carry out such analysis, but with this sector, everything can be taken care of automatically.
  • Assessing the impact of every situation and ranking the problems according to their severity. This will help the developer to resolve any problem efficiently. If any problem occurs, then the system will also indicate to the developer which server/application should be used to reduce the impact of damage or fix the problem.
  • Responsive IT development is improved by collecting real-time data, updating the system and carrying out real-time effective mapping.

Conclusion

If you are in the IT industry, then you are surely aware of the value of data — it is the heart of your industry. Monitoring and administrating your IT network with big data analytics will ensure that your business is in a healthy and fully updated state. It will help you in understanding your own network properly and will also help you with making real-time decisions. If you can implement this idea in your business, then it will improve the end user service, which will further help you to compete strongly and outperform your competitors.

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Kaushik Pal
Technology Specialist
Kaushik Pal
Technology Specialist

Kaushik is a Technical Architect and Software Consultant with over 23 years of experience in software analysis, development, architecture, design, testing and training. He has an interest in new technologies and areas of innovation. He focuses on web architecture, web technologies, Java/J2EE, open source software, WebRTC, big data and semantic technologies. He has demonstrated expertise in requirements analysis, architecture design and implementation, technical use cases and software development. His experience has spanned across industries like insurance, banking, airlines, shipping, document management and product development etc. He has worked on a wide range of technologies ranging from large scale (IBM S/390),…