BladeLogic Inc., Lexington, Mass., revealed three tips to create a lean, mean data center machine--a crucial step for any business, midmarket or otherwise--at a Webinar the vendor hosted last month.
1. Speed Up The Auditing Process
"Corralling auditors, using automation tools, having one single audit in whatever language and having a common understanding saves money," said Jared Victor Blazowski, chief information officer of General Dynamics European Land Systems, Falls Church, Va.
His team reduces the time it has to spend with auditing by predicting what the audit team asks, and then prepopulating the information they need into a management system. Auditors then have access to realtime data, populated, for example, that morning and which has much of the information needed.
2. Minimize Downtime--A Profit Killer
Every organization will face a rollout that doesn't go smoothly; planning for that possibility is crucial. "The approach to take is to minimize risk," Blazowski said, adding that the fact the application does not work is not actually as critical as is the speed with which the problem can be fixed.
3. Prevent Unauthorized Change
"Unauthorized change can be no cost, or can mean 'game over,' " said Curt Smith, senior vice president, global infrastructure, ETrade Financial Corp., New York. "If we have 15 minutes of downtime, we have to report to auditors and you're on the news." ETrade minimizes downtime caused by unauthorized change by monitoring every server every night. "In our world, if you do cause an outage, you're not here any more," Smith said. "It's been a long time since I had to research an outage because of unscheduled change."
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