Companies risk failure with IT infrastructure ‘blind spots’

Enterprises are potentially suffering from "blind spots" in their IT infrastructures.

A survey of 240 IT managers across western Europe conducted by EMC reveals that more than 50% of IT managers currently do not have a reliable, real-time view of their IT infrastructures.

"Lack of visibility into the core IT infrastructure poses significant risks to datacentre consolidation or migration projects, as companies are faced with the manual and time-consuming task of building a reliable picture of their information infrastructure," said Chris Gahagan, EMC senior vice-president for resource management software.

He said, "In addition, IT departments that are unable to relate applications to the underlying IT infrastructure struggle to guarantee SLAs (service level agreements) to their customers and analyse root cause problems in relation to the business."

According to the survey, although 66% of IT managers run their departments based on IT Infrastructure Library guidelines - a set of best practices for delivering quality IT services - only 5% believed IT was a strategic part of their company's business plan.

Additionally, 65% of IT managers currently do not measure the cost of downtime. Without an accurate picture of how often downtime is occurring, and how much it is costing the business, companies cannot effectively improve service levels or reduce costs, said EMC.