What are the most effective means for achieving IT ops excellence?

Based on results collected across a variety of industry verticals – including financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail – Continuity Software’s IT Operations Analytics Benchmark underscores the importance of operational analytics in meeting IT performance goals.

Incorporating operational analytics in decision making

Key findings

Large organizations are the most common users of analytical tools to monitor and measure IT performance goals:

• 57% of the large organizations surveyed use analytical tools to monitor, and measure IT performance goals (versus just 29% of small companies).

Cross-domain operational excellence is mostly measured by uptime:

• 89% of the organizations surveyed measure uptime across most or all IT domains; 66% measure performance; 51% measure the number of open issues.

Frequently tracking configuration consistency helps organizations meet their goals:

• 53% of the organizations that track configuration consistency on a daily basis across the IT infrastructure are meeting or exceeding their goals, compared to 31-33% of the organizations that track only portions of the infrastructure.

Better measurement and analysis tools are required for IT operations excellence:

• 40% of organizations surveyed cited better measurement and analysis tools as the most effective means for achieving operations excellence, followed by tools to detect cross-domain IT configuration issues (22%) and tools to enforce IT best practices (19%).

Storage and network performance rank highest:

• 71% of the organizations surveyed monitor storage and network key performance indicators (KPIs); other areas of IT operations that are commonly monitored and measured include applications (69%), databases (66%), and clusters (49%).

Cloud environments continue to lag behind:

• Only 14% of the organizations surveyed monitor and measure cloud KPIs.
• 43% of the organizations surveyed never analyze configuration consistency in their cloud environment.

Doron Pinhas, CTO, Continuity Software comments: “It is interesting to note that while the push to move data and applications into the cloud continues to escalate, most cloud infrastructure remains under-monitored, and consequently at great risk of unplanned downtime and service disruption.”

The complete survey is available here.