The OASYS Continual Service Improvement

Network Management: How can I go forward when I don't know which way I'm facing? -John Lennon

With the financial downturn I'm seeing that our successful clients are spending to enhancing their management structure to move forward and squeeze every advantage they can out of their IT investment. The companies that are in trouble are holding back on new purchases that have very short ROI's.  I read a great article from the Gartner Group written by John Clark that was posted to the LinkedIn American ITIL Group. 

http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/gc/webletter/metastorm/vol2/issue4/metastorm2.html and will be sending the link to many of our troubled accounts.

Putting my money where my mouth is: After reading the article I contacted Jeff Birschtein at ColumnIT to sign myself and Matt up for the V3 training in NYC. The successful clients we are meeting with all talk about ITIL and processes that are working. So to better serve our customer base and be more in tune with the ITIL certified client we are spending the money to move forward and enhance our own operations. If you haven't seen this befor start at:
http://www.itil.org/en/
and on Linkedin join the American ITIL Group - see you there

Stonesoft is made to order for companies that use ITIL Good Management Practices

SIGNUP FOR THE Recorded Session of Stonesoft <-> ITIL V3 Alignment

June 23rd, 2009 at 11AM to 12PM EST We are running a FREE Web Seminar with Stonesoft aligning StoneGate's (Unified Threat Management System) Firewall/VPN, IPS, Virtual FW+IPS, and Centralized Management Solution to ITIL V3 Practices. We will be identifying "10 Quick Wins for ITIL V3" when implementing Stonesoft's Solution.

Go to REGISTER to sign up to view the On-Demand recorded session of Stonesoft with OASYS and ITIL V3 "10 Quick Wins" Free Seminar.

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The process of aligning your IT to meet your business objectives is a daunting, although has become a necessary endeavor. Business owners want to maximize all the resources and investment in IT to meet the objective and have visibility into the effectiveness of the investment. ITIL is a best practices management approach and defines Services, Processes, and Roles that are organized in a comprehensive framework to enable Continual Service Improvement.

Security of information and its maintenance is of utmost concern and affects everyone.  Every Service and Process owner needs to implement and monitor security relative to their roles.

 Stonesoft has created a product offering that addresses easing the management of IT security across the physical and virtual planes. Through a unified approach that includes Firewalls, Intrusion Protection Systems, Link Load Balancing, Server Load Balancing has been designed as a single Integrated Threat Management system. All this is managed from the StoneGate Management Center satisfying many ITIL practices.

The IT Service Management (ITSM)  key task of fitting security into the management organization is addressed by features of the unified Stonesoft solution.

Security Requirements are specified in underpinning contracts, legislation and possible internal or external imposed policies and the Business Policies. Streamlining and implementing of security policies, monitoring compliance, managing incidents, and the change management process is the driving force behind the design. The hardware and software architecture is targeted at satisfying many of the ITIL principals.

Stonesoft appliances can be clustered into groups of up to 16 units for the purpose of management. These appliances report to and are controlled from the StoneGate Management Center (SMC). Information is correlated between all devices to continually confirm policy enforcement. When planning and building your infrastructure and installing Firewalls, IPS’s, Link and Server Load Balancers the designers are faced with the task of multiple management systems and interfacing security for the element at each stage.

With a unified Stonesoft solution planning and implementing is done in a phased approach. Turnkey Services from Stonesoft allow existing systems to continue to operate and these systems are monitored by StoneGate Management Center through a Transition Lifecycle into operation.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are made available through an evaluation when the Stonesoft appliances are in “learn mode”. Once active the KPI’s are continually reported to the SMC. The SLA’s for Firewall VPN, IPS, Link Load Balancer, Server Load Balancer are all monitored from a single location and correlated for departmental or enterprise wide monitoring.

Consider the replacement of older or homegrown Firewalls. Once Stonesoft Firewalls are in place a phased approach to replacing Server Load Balancers may be the next improvement since Stonesoft will provide SSL inspection of encrypted traffic.  This migration can be controlled from the StoneGate Management Center . The product can purchased to effectively replace any of the five appliances and later upgraded to replace the remaining four.

Reports are generated throughout the processes to confirm desired outcomes. Logs of all activity, alerts, performance, incidents, and system health are archived in a consistent manner and are always accessible. Service Managers and Process Owners have a clear picture of security relative to their role without the task of manually collecting and correlating multiple logs and reports from several elements.

Audit reporting, system upgrades, compliance, incident control, and capacity monitoring is streamlined from several management systems to one StoneGate Management Center. There are less individual SLA’s to manage, less individual appliances, lower the cost of management, and simplification of several complex operations.

 

Here’s a quote from Denys Foley at Xerox that summarizes the advantages of Stonesoft…

Based on Xerox's return-on-investment calculations, the Stonesoft firewalls paid for themselves in just over a year when used only as firewalls. But when adding their VPN, content switching and multi-link WAN load-balancing capabilities -- which were not considered when the gear was bought -- the devices have generated more savings, according to Denys Foley, the infrastructure manager for Xerox Global Services in Rochester, N.Y.

"We spend less time setting up VPNs and their policies," he says. "I have also taken my content switches out of the Web farm, and I let the firewalls handle distributing the load among Web servers. I get rid of licenses and training, and I can manage all [these functions] from one console."

IT Service Management Check List

I was thinking of a check list of how to approach IT Service Management with emphasis on where OASYS can provide solutions. The first thing is to know where we are so we can measure the changes.
(After stating the Business' Objectives of what they do to make money - or operate and provide IT services)

 1. Get an inventory of hardware and applications and a near real time network map!
That last one seems to be a major problem in most organizations. I'm guessing 2 maps - one logical for applications and one showing a topology that can be drilled down.