ITBVM: IT Business Value Modeler

Abstract

Today, enterprise IT environments are complex as never before with individual applications, tiers, or technologies segregated into individual management domains. Typically, the value of business applications and the dependencies between business and IT objects and IT objects among each other is unknown or at least not up to date. Thus, ultimately, the business value of individual IT tasks is unknown. Hence it is very hard to perform global management services such as performance optimization in resource-constrained environments. This deficiency is even more deeply felt by an internal or external services provider called in to perform an optimization or to improve an IT management framework.We propose a framework ITBVM for business-value driven IT optimization with particular emphasis on such enterprise environments. A key part is the use of discovery technologies to provide the link between business value and IT objects. As one instance of the framework, we show how discovery can improve a performance-optimization problem in an otherwise blackbox scenario. We validate these improvements through experiments in a controlled setup and through statistical interpretation of fine-grained dependency discovery in a large real enterprise environment.

Cloud Interoperability via Quick Enterprise Applications Re-Builds

“…Before any transformation can begin it is necessary to collect information about the current situation with all IT components (discover), their utilization, and interdependencies (Bai et al, 2013). Thus, it is necessary to discover hardware, software, applications inventory (Joukov et al, 2008), business importance of the assets, and related risks they can tolerate (Joukov et al, 2009), aspects of storage (Joukov et al, 2010), and network operation (Ramasamy et al, 2011).…”

Managing business health in the presence of malicious attacks

“…Identifying what IT system components are needed to support each business process activity is a complex undertaking. Previous work (involving some authors of this paper) [3] describes how such a mapping can be performed in an enterprise setting. The first step is the identification of the IT entry points for each business activity.…”

“…In an environment of constrained IT budgets, enterprises are increasingly interested in tools and technologies for IT infrastructure optimization that factor in business value as the primary driver. Recent works have explored the linkage between IT system-level optimization actions and business value in the context of job scheduling, resource allocation, and performance, e.g., [3]. However, they do not address the provision of dependability in the presence of malicious attacks at the IT infrastructure level that simultaneously optimizes for the overall business value.…”

“…Such documentation is not only rare in practice but, even if present, also difficult to keep up-to-date. With the advent of automated discovery tools for fine-grained application dependencies, like Galapagos [3], [5], the ability to perform this mapping for largescale IT infrastructures is only now starting to become a reality. Second, it requires understanding and quantification of the impact of violation of dependability and security (i.e., business health) supported by the IT system components underlying these business processes.…”