Intelligent Automation to Enhance Your IT Team
The IT skills shortage of today reminds me of a story from the 18th century.
As the story goes, the composer and musician Franz Josef Haydn decided his orchestra needed a break from its extended working vacation at the summer palace of his patron, Prince Nicolas Esterházy. However, no one dared complain to the prince.
Haydn, therefore, wrote a symphony (#45 in F sharp) with an ending that spoke for him and his orchestra.
As the piece ended, one by one, each musician stood, extinguished the candle in front of him, and walked from the stage, until only two remained. The popular name of the piece was the “Farewell” Symphony. The prince received the message, and everyone was able to go home to their family soon after the performance ended.
If you have an IT team, then you may feel like Prince Nicolas did as he watched the orchestra melt away before his eyes.
As you doubtlessly already know, skilled, experienced IT and cyber-security people are increasingly scarce and expensive. Those who are already engaged and retained – if any – are aging and retiring at an increasing rate .
Numbers Behind the IT Skill Shortage
Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) recently surveyed more than 600 IT decision makers from over 20 industries. Respondents were asked in which areas of IT their organizations had a problematic shortage of existing skills.
Over one-fifth of respondents also cited network (23%), storage (22%) and database (22%) management. Even more cited application development (25%); data protection, backup and recovery (26%); server virtualization and administration (26%); and IT architecture and planning (33%).
The top area survey respondents cited? Cybersecurity (51%).
The State of Cybersecurity 2018 report by ISACA, the non-profit IT advocacy group, surveyed a group of IT security professionals. Of those responding, 3 in 5 of their organizations have unfilled security positions. Even more troubling, more than half (54%) require three months or more to fill each of those vacancies.
Bridge the IT Skills Gap with Modern Management
Fortunately, modern management solutions can help you extend the abilities of your people. Modern management solutions help improve the security and performance of your IT, without having to hire scarce and costly additional staff or expensive traditional consultants.
To begin, you need automated, comprehensive discovery and mapping of your IT environment. This task must discover and document all critical assets, as well as the relationships that connect your processes, applications, and users.
You need this information to make the best possible decisions about IT Asset Management (ITAM), IT Service Management (ITSM), and digital transformation. In addition, once you have a comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date map of those resources and relationships, regular scans will flag changes in those assets or their configurations.
This information can help you identify, isolate, and resolve vulnerabilities or suspicious changes before they become successful attacks on your environment.
Consolidation of that information into a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is the strategic next step, if your business doesn’t already rely on one. The right CMDB approach assures a single version of the truth driving all your IT decisions at your business, based on the most current, comprehensive, and timely information.
As you improve your knowledge of your environment, you can improve the processes that govern your IT deployments and efforts to maximize their business value. Managed services can make your deployments and their refinement swift to accelerate the growth of business value and reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
With the right combination of tools, services, and processes, your business can achieve these benefits and more, without hiring more staff or any traditional consultants. In addition, you can empower your people to deliver better services that support and add more business value. A boon for your users, your team, you, and your business.
Virima: Your Partner in IT
Virima’s solutions for Discovery, ITAM and ITSM deliver features and functions required to deliver maximum management and value of your IT environment with your current staff.
Virima’s solutions can capture and inventory data about your IT environment’s components automatically, map dependencies, visualize relationships, and provide accurate, complete, and timely information about your environment.
Virima also offers a suite of managed Saas services (MSS). Dedicated MSS team members create configurations, reports, probes, and other items required to hit the ground running with your Virima tool deployments.
These services are available during implementation or anytime you have new goals for using Virima. Users simply submit requests from within Virima for the MSS team to complete. Most common requests will be completed within the same day.
With MSS, Virima also monitors your Virima system and suggests ways to improve results and further drive adoption. Take full advantage of Virima’s features, without performing any of the necessary configuration changes.
Virima solutions can help make your environment more available, compliant, manageable, responsive, secure, stable, and valuable to your business. Virima’s Managed Services make those solutions even easier to use, and significantly reduce your total cost of ownership (TCO).
Let us show you how to beat the IT skills shortage with the combination of our solutions, our services and our expertise. We can help you grow and enhance your IT to drive business, without having to increase your staff or be dependent on outside help.
To get started, contact us today to schedule a demo and explore the possibilities!
