Bridging the gap between IT infrastructure and business services

A gap exists between IT’s business continuity readiness and the organization’s expectations for service availability. IT sees disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) in terms of the infrastructure that they manage, patch, backup and protect, but lack insight in to how the infrastructure ties to business services. On the other hand, business expects IT to figure out how to keep their solutions running.

Now there is a better way to understand how your business services connect with the underlying IT infrastructure. IT Continuity Architect (ITCA) bridges the gap between IT and business by adding the essential visibility in to how your IT Infrastructure and continuity plans map to the business; ensuring your critical business applications are always available. Architect automatically analyzes IT infrastructure, maps dependencies, and tracks changes; showing you what is at risk and what needs to be done in order to ensure the success of your business continuity plan.

Align Business & IT

Downtime puts your reputation at risk; Architect helps to avoid that. By letting IT set recovery objectives by business service, Architect allows companies to decrease the risk of outages, reduce the cost of disaster recovery and maintain compliance with service level agreements.

Discover Your Assets

Plug-in and discover. Within minutes, Architect identifies IT infrastructure components and provides a map of dependencies between applications, hypervisors, servers and other inventory objects, giving IT insight in to the impact of potential changes.

Care-Free Automation

While every IT professional has access to inventory and discovery tools, the process is a manual, time-consuming effort involving spreadsheets, run books, and detailed analysis. Architect automates the process by automatically monitoring IT availability targets, and connecting changes in the underlying infrastructure to the risk they pose to the business.

We can bridge the gap between IT and business together.

Automated Infrastructure and Dependency Discovery

Upon install, Architect automatically begins discovering IT infrastructure and the associated dependencies. Within minutes, Architect identifies IT infrastructure components and provides a map of dependencies between applications, hypervisors, servers and other inventory objects, giving IT insight in to the impact of potential changes. This saves administrators hours of manual effort they would otherwise need to spend identifying and cataloging the infrastructure, applications and the various dependencies.

Business Services Mapping

Architect lets administrators easily define business services and map those automatically to the underlying IT infrastructure. Architect aggregates IT infrastructure and applications into groups based on their interdependencies. Users can easily define business services and visualize the IT infrastructure supporting each service. With Architect, administrators can understand which IT components are the most important to the business, and how business services map to IT infrastructure.

Define Business Continuity Targets

With Architect IT managers can define business continuity and availability service level targets for each business service and immediately identify non-compliant components of the infrastructure. Architect provides four service level tiers that users can customize to define their own targets, then assign each business service to the appropriate tier. Architect automatically reports on any gaps or misconfigurations of protection infrastructure. This lets IT know in advance if there are any gaps in the organization’s protection strategy that put the business at risk.

Risk Identification Heat Map

Architect’s visual heat map helps prioritize remediation efforts based on risk. From the analysis of established availability service level tiers and the number of key dependencies, Architect’s heat maps show which servers are the most critical to business continuity. The visual map lets IT intelligently prioritize remediation efforts for systems that are out of compliance. Intuitive representation of infrastructure identifies the most critical IT components so administrators know what gaps to fix first.

Availability Monitoring and Reporting

Architect provides ongoing and continuous monitoring, assurance and reporting of service level compliance. By automating the discovery of new or updated IT infrastructure, Architect dynamically ties changes to service level targets. IT can proactively manage and report on business continuity preparedness and compliance. Architect lets IT managers automatically assure that the organization can meet service level commitments and keep the business online.

IT Continuity Architect Technical Overview

The concepts and technologies that Architect employs to discover, analyze, monitor and model production IT inventory to deliver value to its users are described in more detail here. Architect works through a simple and streamlined process, beginning with deployment:

  • Packaging and Deployment. Architect is packaged asa Linux-based Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) that upon deployment registers itself as a VMware vCenter Server extension and installs in less than 10 minutes.
  • Administration. Management of Architect is delivered as a user-interface plug-in to the VMware vSphere 5.1 Web Client (see Figure 1 – Architect Dashboard). As such, the end-user experience should be very familiar to any VMware vSphere administrator.
Architect-Dashboard

(Figure 1 – Architect Dashboard)

IT Continuity Architect in Detail

Architect works by first discovering the environment and presenting the results in the dashboard, then seeks additional inputs from administrators, such as system credentials or definition of business services. Through ongoing analysis of the infrastructure, Architect is able to:

  • Show relationships and dependencies between infrastructure components, applications and business services
  • Identify any gaps in the business continuity infrastructure
  • Model the impact on business continuity readiness of potential changes
  • And much more!
Neverfail IT Continuity Architect White Paper

This technical white paper is designed to help IT Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) professionals understand what problems Neverfail IT Continuity Architect (Architect) solves, how the product works and what value they can expect from deploying it within their datacenter. Let’s start with a discussion of the problems and issues that Architect seeks to address.

Neverfail IT Continuity Architect Datasheet

  • Overview of benefits and capabilities for IT Continuity Architect
J O Hambro Captital Management Case Study

See how JO Hambro guarantees application and service uptime, ensuring that investment portfolios can continue to grow, while supporting business and end-user efficiency.

+ Architect Features

Automated Infrastructure and Dependency Discovery

Upon install, Architect automatically begins discovering IT infrastructure and the associated dependencies. Within minutes, Architect identifies IT infrastructure components and provides a map of dependencies between applications, hypervisors, servers and other inventory objects, giving IT insight in to the impact of potential changes. This saves administrators hours of manual effort they would otherwise need to spend identifying and cataloging the infrastructure, applications and the various dependencies.

Business Services Mapping

Architect lets administrators easily define business services and map those automatically to the underlying IT infrastructure. Architect aggregates IT infrastructure and applications into groups based on their interdependencies. Users can easily define business services and visualize the IT infrastructure supporting each service. With Architect, administrators can understand which IT components are the most important to the business, and how business services map to IT infrastructure.

Define Business Continuity Targets

With Architect IT managers can define business continuity and availability service level targets for each business service and immediately identify non-compliant components of the infrastructure. Architect provides four service level tiers that users can customize to define their own targets, then assign each business service to the appropriate tier. Architect automatically reports on any gaps or misconfigurations of protection infrastructure. This lets IT know in advance if there are any gaps in the organization’s protection strategy that put the business at risk.

Risk Identification Heat Map

Architect’s visual heat map helps prioritize remediation efforts based on risk. From the analysis of established availability service level tiers and the number of key dependencies, Architect’s heat maps show which servers are the most critical to business continuity. The visual map lets IT intelligently prioritize remediation efforts for systems that are out of compliance. Intuitive representation of infrastructure identifies the most critical IT components so administrators know what gaps to fix first.

Availability Monitoring and Reporting

Architect provides ongoing and continuous monitoring, assurance and reporting of service level compliance. By automating the discovery of new or updated IT infrastructure, Architect dynamically ties changes to service level targets. IT can proactively manage and report on business continuity preparedness and compliance. Architect lets IT managers automatically assure that the organization can meet service level commitments and keep the business online.

+ How It Works
IT Continuity Architect Technical Overview

The concepts and technologies that Architect employs to discover, analyze, monitor and model production IT inventory to deliver value to its users are described in more detail here. Architect works through a simple and streamlined process, beginning with deployment:

  • Packaging and Deployment. Architect is packaged asa Linux-based Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) that upon deployment registers itself as a VMware vCenter Server extension and installs in less than 10 minutes.
  • Administration. Management of Architect is delivered as a user-interface plug-in to the VMware vSphere 5.1 Web Client (see Figure 1 – Architect Dashboard). As such, the end-user experience should be very familiar to any VMware vSphere administrator.
Architect-Dashboard

(Figure 1 – Architect Dashboard)

IT Continuity Architect in Detail

Architect works by first discovering the environment and presenting the results in the dashboard, then seeks additional inputs from administrators, such as system credentials or definition of business services. Through ongoing analysis of the infrastructure, Architect is able to:

  • Show relationships and dependencies between infrastructure components, applications and business services
  • Identify any gaps in the business continuity infrastructure
  • Model the impact on business continuity readiness of potential changes
  • And much more!
+ Related Resources
Neverfail IT Continuity Architect White Paper

This technical white paper is designed to help IT Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) professionals understand what problems Neverfail IT Continuity Architect (Architect) solves, how the product works and what value they can expect from deploying it within their datacenter. Let’s start with a discussion of the problems and issues that Architect seeks to address.

Neverfail IT Continuity Architect Datasheet

  • Overview of benefits and capabilities for IT Continuity Architect
+ Customer Success
J O Hambro Captital Management Case Study

See how JO Hambro guarantees application and service uptime, ensuring that investment portfolios can continue to grow, while supporting business and end-user efficiency.

Interested in learning more about IT Continuity Architect?