Why use analytics for IT?

The need for smarter IT decision making

magnifyingglass.pngWe all know that to make good decisions we should base our reasoning on the best facts available. But when it comes to taking decisions about the future of your IT, increasing complexity, high levels of change and a lack of visibility is making it harder than ever to drive smart decisions.

How do you balance resources, keep pace with change, and deliver business growth and efficiency without blowing the budget or introducing unwelcome risk?

That's where an advanced analytics approach comes in.

Unlocking the value in your big data

At Sumerian, we believe the answers to the challenges facing IT leaders today can be found in the big data lying dormant in IT environments - and we have a fresh approach to unlocking its value.

We bring a unique perspective, combining IT operations expertise with software engineering and data science. With the business environment constantly changing we believe it’s important to be able to dynamically mine the emerging trends and patterns within your business and IT data, understanding the complex relationships, to help drive agility and alignment of IT to business needs.

Transparency to see the big picture

With today's complex, heterogeneous architectures - aligning IT services to meet the continuing needs of the business has never been harder. Our analytics approach delivers visibility and understanding into complex environments and their interdependencies - cutting through the complexity with powerful data cleansing and integration, statistical modelling, predictive analytics and quantified recommendations.

Accurately aligning IT to business performance

When millisecond delays in processing could make the difference between success or failure in high risk, high value environments, it's essential for IT teams to provision resources accurately to match business demand. With our analytics you will be armed with a newfound insight about the performance of business-impacting services, enabling you to optimise your resources to best support the business.

Leveraging IT resources effectively

In fast-paced, competitive business markets where change is ever present, siloed information from applications, domains and service providers only go to muddy an already complex picture. Instead, our analytics connect the dots across all tiers of the organisation. Resources can be effectively weighed and managed - de-risking decisions and leveraging resources for the best gains.

Powerful modelling and predictive analytics

Using an analytics approach to connect and join the dots between disparate pools of data, we create models that span all parts of the IT landscape from users to individual infrastructure components. Within our solution framework we have a broad range of capabilities that can be applied to a number of complex IT and business challenges. Whatever your level of IT operational maturity or business focus, we work with you to identify the right mix of analytics to solve your particular challenges. And as your challenges change, we adapt our analytics mix.

Optimising performance
Our performance and latency analytics provides advanced visibility to identify the root causes of under-performing services, reduce latency, and quantify where targeted investment or reconfiguration will deliver the most value.

  • End-to-end performance visibility for optimised user experience
  • Holisitic latency management and reduction

 

Aligning IT capacity with the business
Our capacity analytics radically improves visibility into your IT environment and its available headroom against business volumes, enabling you to accurately provision and forecast capacity requirements against demand and business growth.

  • Accurate visibility of current capacity from infrastructure through to business processes/transactions and users
  • Correlation of business volumes with infrastructure utilisation
  • Linear and step change forecasting

 

De-risking and understanding the impact of change
Our analytics helps you to understand and de-risk the impact of change through the application of powerful scenario modelling and post change analysis, enabling you to respond rapidly and appreciate the full implications to your infrastructure and the business. Pre and post change assessment of:

  • Impact of change to service performance and capacity
  • Impact of new technology, business change and market growth

 

Accurate alignment through IT usage
Our analytics provides precision information on the consumption profiles of your IT by end-users, business processes and transactions, enabling you to compile powerful business cases and take alignment decisions backed up with hard facts.

  • Profiling of transaction and user demand for accurate IT-business alignment and service portfolio management
  • Identifying trends and behaviour shifts that could impact IT delivery and provisioning

 

Controlling costs
Through deep examination of your IT environment, we uncover inefficiencies with your supplier billing, identify areas for consolidation or targeted investment.

  • Identification of inefficiencies from over provisioned or mis-aligned IT and opportunities for rationalisation and consolidation
  • Assessments for optimised and targeted investment
  • Assessments of IT suppliers for tariff optimisation

 

On-demand answers

Armed with our intelligent insight you can answer questions which, although key to aligning IT to deliver value for the business, traditionally go unanswered, such as:

  • What is the current demand on our key applications? And do we have sufficient capacity to meet growth targets?
  • How can we be sure migration to a private cloud environment won't impact the end user experience?
  • What trading volumes can we currently support and what will the impact be of a change in the trading mix? ?
  • How do we know whether we are getting value for money from our outsourced communications service?

 

The outcomes you can expect

Bold claims are rife in the IT industry. Many of us are lured in by the hype some IT products and services are adorned with, only to be disappointed with the end results.

What we can say about our solutions is that our fully independent, no-nonsense approach is helping a growing number of enterprise IT organisations make the most appropriate, validated decisions around their IT - and is producing some great results and value for our clients. Here are some of our most recent successes