How Well Do You Know Your Application Relationships?

Can you or your team accurately define all of the relationships that exist between your business applications and the IT infrastructure?  One of the most daunting questions that is asked of Enterprise IT organizations is if they truly understand the relationships that exists between the business applications that they support as well as what dependencies those business applications have on infrastructure services.   Does your IT organization have this information readily available in a system that would satisfy an internal audit or a regulatory agency?

These sort of questions typically surface when a firm is looking to consolidate data centers, considering the virtualization of business applications, or embracing various cloud capabilities and technologies.  In order to be successful at any of these activities and mitigate associated operational risks, the IT organization needs to have a deep understanding of the relationships and use this knowledge to effectively plan, design, and implement transformational programs.

A key technical capability that should be utilized as part of this rationalization exercise is application discovery and dependency mapping (or ADDM).  ADDM solutions capture several critical pieces of information useful to understand application relationships and the workloads associated with those applications.  Information such as the running software on a host and the network communications those software instances are creating provide insight to the nature of the dependency.  Furthermore, one begins to understand the quantity of connections that are initiated from one system to another, understand the demand on the application from a user perspective, and gain insight on network connectivity and dependencies.   With most of these application discovery technologies, if some level of application modeling is performed during this rationalization exercise, additional insight into the nature of the relationships is gained.

This level of data gives IT great visibility into the nature of the relationships between applications and infrastructure services, and provides great data to network engineering teams as network architectures and designs are developed for these environments.  In addition, application and service onboarding teams can use this data as workloads are rationalized and brought onto these environments.

To round out this capability, performance data should be collected for the applications and business services that are in scope.  This data can then be coupled with the relationship data to give a very complete picture of the relationships that exist and, more importantly, ensure that the appropriate applications and workloads are coupled from a performance perspective; thereby not impacting application stability and performance in the new environment.

The concept may sound time consuming and complicated, and in some cases it may take some organizational alignment to get to this level, but the effort definitely pays off in the long run by providing a transparent view of your business applications and the relationships that exist between them.  Before you know it, other groups and departments in IT will be keen to see this data and the business will have more confidence in IT when it comes time to embrace the cloud or undertake the data center migration program.

Tags: Featured

Category: Business Alignment, Datacenter Transformation, IT Management