How Microsoft Core Infrastructure Supports Business Services and Workloads
Published: March 3, 2008
All businesses require a solid infrastructure to support their operations. For example, an airport provides services, such as catering, security checks, baggage handling, restaurant services, and fuel services, as well as critical services, such as radar and runway scheduling. An airport is dependent on the computing and communications infrastructure services on which these business services and workloads reside. These IT services must be consistently available, secure, reliable, continuously at the right capacity, of the right quality, and at the right cost. Without this, an airport grinds to a halt. To help organizations assess how well-matched their infrastructure is for supporting their business workloads, Microsoft provides an Infrastructure Optimization (IO) Model. The IO Model helps customers realize dramatic cost savings for their IT infrastructure by moving from an unmanaged environment towards a dynamic environment. Security improves from highly vulnerable in a Basic infrastructure to dynamically proactive in a more mature infrastructure. IT infrastructure management changes from highly manual and reactive to highly automated and proactive. Processes move from fragmented or nonexistent to optimized and repeatable. A customer's ability to use technology to improve their business agility and deliver business value increases as they move from the Basic state up the continuum toward a Dynamic state, empowering information workers, managers, and supporting new business opportunities. IO allows organizations to obtain immediate benefits and grow over time by helping them understand and subsequently improve the current state of their IT infrastructures and what that means in terms of cost, security, risk, and operational agility. The IO Model defines four levels of maturity and how they relate to this business capability:
Figure 3. The IO Model By utilizing the IO maturity model, organizations can benchmark their technical and process capability to measure their ability to deliver business value. Organizations can improve their maturity through their adoption and use of MSF, MOF, Solution Accelerators, and System Center products. As shown in figure 3, these core service management components provide the foundational practices, processes, guidance, and technologies required for the optimization of the Windows infrastructure.
Figure 4. How Microsoft process guidance, tools, solutions, and technologies support the optimization of the Windows platform The remainder of this paper describes these core service management components and their purpose, and provides case studies demonstrating customer successes through their adoption of Microsoft service management components. Service Management FrameworksMicrosoft Solutions Framework (MSF)MSF is a flexible, interrelated series of concepts, models, and best practices that lay the foundation for planning, building, and managing technology projects. It draws from a collection of internal and external best practices that have been proven effective in managing development, infrastructure, and integration projects. As MSF was developed and continues to evolve, these practices have been consolidated and simplified for easier understanding and adoption, then verified through application in real-world projects. The result is a solution delivery approach specifically designed to deal with change, identify and manage risks, assign resources, and establish easy-to-understand team and process structures. The MSF Process Model focuses on the solutions development phase of the life cycle, which is composed of five stages:
MSF works closely with MOF in understanding the following service management process requirements in order to integrate them into the solution being developed:
Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF)MOF is a framework for managing the operations and support of IT systems, making adjustments due to changing business needs easier as well as optimizing processes for greater efficiency. MOF is based on extensive user research on people and their roles, responsibilities, and skills (IT pro personas). The goal of MOF is to help IT organizations achieve reliability, availability, supportability, and manageability in their mission-critical systems. Because MOF practices are easy to incorporate, either selectively or comprehensively, operations staff can realize tangible benefits by following the model. Applying the principles of ITIL and other IT service management frameworks to the Microsoft technology platform, MOF provides a foundation to help IT organizations meet the challenges described above and support the goal of continuous improvement. MOF utilizes a three-pronged strategy to achieve this goal:
MOF simplifies IT service management processes using a model that is illustrated with clear, easily understood diagrams. MOF focuses on the changing and deploying, operating, supporting, and optimizing stages of the IT service life cycle—that is, the solutions operation phase of the life cycle. Continuous Improvement Roadmap (CIR)If IT service providers want to meet the business needs of the organizations they support, they must get better at what they do and then keep on getting better. In short, they have to learn how to continuously improve. That process of continuous improvement is not a destination, but rather a journey directed toward sustained quality of IT services. CIR is a vehicle to help make continuous improvement of IT services more actionable and achievable. The primary goal of CIR is to help IT organizations succeed with the Microsoft platform while providing and applying linkages into existing and established service management best practices. It includes both an assessment tool to pinpoint areas of “pain” in IT service management, as well as a methodology for implementing service improvement projects.
Figure 5. Continuous Improvement Roadmap (CIR) Case Study: The University of Kansas HospitalTo help streamline operations, the University of Kansas Hospital ITS team paired with Microsoft Services and implemented the Microsoft Services Service Management Assessment (SMA) solution and guided the hospital on its Service Improvement Program (SIP). Microsoft Services helped ITS convert its challenges into problem-opportunity statements and then prioritized these statements based on risk, cost, time, and business value. Using this information, Microsoft Services developed a Service Improvement Program: a series of service management initiatives that focused on aligning business objectives with ITS goals to ensure definition, delivery, and continuous improvement of the hospital’s IT services. The program also helped ITS develop numerous processes around IT operations. According to Ann Rose, assistant director of ITS in charge of the Service Management strategy, “The incident classification matrix and monthly metric scorecard help us better monitor workgroup trends, including breaches of service level objectives, mean time to recovery of incidents, and customer satisfaction scores.” For example, ITS staff automated their desktop deployment process with the use of Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 R2. To help ensure quality, ITS developed a checklist that end users must sign off on when a desktop is deployed. ITS has seen a steady 8–10 percent decline in incident records each month, and the number of workgroups that breached their service-level objectives for incident resolution declined 50 percent in the same six-month period. In addition, a new change management process that assesses risk when reviewing significant change requests has provided improved stability around configuration changes. The Change Manager tracks and trends these metrics and reported that, in the first quarter of 2007, the average monthly instances of server downtime due to flawed changes reached a low of 47—an 84 percent change from the monthly average of 293 in 2005. “Now, the ITS department is in a more strategic position where we can effectively catalyze some change within IT. The focus on the need for operations process standardization has allowed us to build repeatable processes,” Rose said. System Center Family of ProductsTo increase an organization’s service management capability requires the integration and automation of process and IT pro activities. The Microsoft System Center family of products facilitates this automation and integration, helping to reduce service management complexity and delivering a reliable and consistent operations experience designed especially for the Microsoft environment including Microsoft® SQL Server™, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office System, and the Microsoft .Net Framework. Automation of the service management frameworks is achieved via three key features of the System Center products:
The System Center family of products includes the following tools:
System Center is consequently well positioned to efficiently and effectively automate many of the service management tasks that IT pros face daily. For example, monitoring and managing the hardware and software in a distributed computing environment is an essential part of the on-going deployment and operations phase of the service management life cycle. But how does that software get onto the managed systems? Once it’s installed, how is the correct configuration maintained on each machine, including any necessary updates or patches? And how can an administrator keep track of what’s installed on each system or even know what hardware and software assets are in the environment? The answers to these questions along with the rest of the System Center capabilities uniquely support the practical delivery of the ITIL framework. Solution AcceleratorsSolution Accelerators integrate System Center technologies with integrated MSF and MOF guidance to deliver packaged solutions to the complex problems of IT service delivery. Solution Accelerators cover many areas of the IT infrastructure, including:
For example, the Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) is best-practice guidance for desktop deployment, aimed at reducing deployment time, effort, and cost by increasing the level of automation. It allows administrators to deploy desktops with Zero Touch and Lite Touch interaction at the target PCs. This solution also helps organizations move to a managed environment with standardized desktop images, thereby reducing system complexity and increasing its overall manageability. BDD uses System Center technologies to automate the software distribution process and works with the underpinning of the core Windows infrastructure to make it possible. The following case study demonstrates how one company used a Microsoft Solution Accelerator. Case Study: Sony Ericsson Mobile CommunicationsSony Ericsson Mobile Communications, a global provider of mobile multimedia devices, wanted to improve IT security and simplify the deployment and management of a standardized computer desktop environment. In keeping with its innovative nature, it also wanted to be proactive in evaluating the latest technologies. Through participation in a Microsoft Technology Adoption Program (TAP), Sony Ericsson upgraded a pilot group of computers to the Windows Vista® Enterprise operating system. Once the new system is deployed throughout the company, Sony Ericsson anticipates that it will be able to reduce time spent rebuilding the desktop configuration on employees’ computers by 50 percent. It also expects to better safeguard sensitive company data, drive down IT costs associated with damage recovery, and enable the company to operate with fewer IT people dedicated solely to support tasks. For further information, see the complete case study at Sony Ericsson Improves Security, Reduces Support Costs with New Operating System. |
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