IT Service Support describes the operational process required to analyze and maintain IT resource capacity, availability, continuity, and committed service levels. Policy-driven automation from Enigmatec provides the unifying foundation technology required to collect service metrics and determine compliance with enterprise-wide service levels, regardless of the underlying technologies or processes in place. But, what do we mean by “policy-driven” automation?

Quite simply, “Policy” is a declaration of the applicable administration, management and access associated with company resources. However, unlike legacy automation and desired state management, real policies make no assumptions about the types or qualities of the IT resources through which policies are enforced.

Enigmatec’s technology enables policies to be defined independent of the underlying technology, and applied across multiple domains. Policy is central to everything we do: it’s not enough to automate a workflow; we believe it is critical to assign a metric, or Service Level Objective (SLO), to every IT process workflow. By assigning SLOs to every process, Enigmatec tools not only streamline workflows, but enforce a “service-level” mindset and enable measurement and reporting of adherence to service level agreements (SLAs).

Enigmatec SLO Management [Click on image to expand].

Enigmatec’s new solution in this space is Enigmatec’s Automated Disaster Recovery solution (ADR) which is designed to monitor KPI’s of key services or sites and then (based on policy) make decisions in real time to ensure SLO’s associated with those services are met. For example, we may have an SLO around the performance of a critical web enabled service. If performance starts to dip to such an extend that a performance based SLO may be breached, ADR can bring on new capacity for the service in an attempt to improve the performance , or perhaps it would shut down some secondary processes to provide the critical service with the resources it needs to maintain performance targets. ADR also has the capability to implement full disaster recovery strategies. In the above scenario, should the attempts to maintain performance fail, or perhaps the service begins to fail altogether, ADR can send notifications to key stakeholders to gain authorization for a complete service failover to another location.

Automating the infrastructure in real-time is finally making the “On-Demand” data center a reality.

Learn more about ITIL process automation by viewing our customer case studies