Transforming Management with Automation...possible support experience incorporates the right mix of human contact and automation. Help Desk Management With help desk automation, your

© 2017 CMS IT services Pvt.Ltd.

Transforming IT Service Management with Automation

Transforming IT Service Management with Automation

© 2017 CMS IT services Pvt.Ltd. 02

03

04

04

06

08

09

1 1

12

Introduction

Automation in IT infrastructure

Asset Management

Data Center Operations Management

Customer Service

User self-service

Conclusion

About Us

CONTENTS

The Digital Transformation

Digital transformation has forced the hand of IT MSPs to evolve from a reactive to proactive approach in terms of both adopting and supporting automation. Automation needs to become a central driving principle to help businesses progress.

The Rise of the Customer Experience

The digital era has significantly changed the customer journey, with increased expectations for an easy, fast, and quality user experience. As a result, MSPs need to focus on automation to create value for their customers.


InroductionAsset Management involves managing investments, assets, and resources for better decision making and for cost reduction. It lets IT managers know-from procurement through disposal-what they have, where their assets are located, how much they cost, and who is using them. Software asset management keeps track of software licenses to improve utilization and decrease IT spending, controlling expenditure, and driving compliance

Automated IT asset management software can help you simplify the cost, complexity and compliance equation around managing software assets, enabling you to focus less on day-to-day operations and more on bringing value to the business. For example, with automated software asset management you may be able to lower or eliminate unnecessary spend, reduce licensing costs, avoid the risks and costs of non-compliance (e.g., penalties, business disruptions, reallocation of resources and brand damage), improve visibility into asset utilization and streamline process efficiency and responsiveness relevant to your IT assets.

The Shift to Agile

Shifting the IT service anagement strategy to an agile service management strategy involves better alignment to company objectives and customer needs, right from the beginning.By automating tasks, MSPs will realize greater efficiency, productivity, and higher quality of service, at scale.

With the right automation technology, MSPs can transform their current framework into an engine that drives continuous improvement and business growth into the future.

Service Management


Automating the asset management process results in many important benefits for the corporation such as better accountability of IT assets, improved IT service levels, and more reliable risk management.

Asset Management involves managing investments, assets, and resources for better decision making and for cost reduction. It provides IT managers with a complete view- from procurement through disposal-what they have, where their assets are located, how much they cost, and who is using them. Software asset management keeps track of software licenses to improve utilization and decrease IT spending, controlling expenditure, and driving compliance

IT asset management automation can help you simplify the cost, complexity and compliance in regards to managing software assets, enabling you to focus less on day-to-day operations and more on bringing value to the business. For example, with automated software asset management you may be able to lower or eliminate unnecessary spend, reduce licensing costs, avoid the risks and costs of non-compliance(e.g., penalties, business disruptions, reallocation of resources and brand damage), improve visibility into asset

AUTOMATION IN IT

Asset Management

INFRASTRUCTURE

utilization and streamline process efficiency and responsiveness relevant to your IT assets.


Whenever the help desk receives a call for assistance in troubleshooting an end-user workstation problem, the automated asset management solution can perform an audit of the device to reveal what components and software are affected or may possibly be the cause of the incident. The technician can check data revealed by the audit or even check behavior against any known issues. Once the cause is determined, steps to remediate the issue can be easily accomplished.

By establishing automated solutions, the IT teams can either prevent, or substantially reduce the effects of problems. Furthermore, mission-critical resources within a data center or server room require monitoring in order to maintain uptime. System variables can be monitored, alerting IT administrators to events that can cause downtime.

Simultaneously, IT administrators will be notified immediately and can quickly initiate the steps necessary to remediate the problem or plan appropriately to prevent an imminent outage.

In addition, having an automated asset management solution and discovery process enables IT professionals to assess compliance and software license agreements. This accurate, up-to-date accounting of information is critical for effective risk management.

Discovery involves the need to account for all IT assets of an organization. For example, IT teams needs to know asset location, configuration, and usage to effectively keep the system up and running. An automated discovery solution takes away the guesswork and helps determine exactly what you have on your network. Furthermore, it continuously monitors and detects any new IT devices or software added to the system, eliminating the need for someone to manually search for new additions, spend time logging them into each system, and physically maintaining them throughout their lifecycles.

Automating the asset management process results in many important benefits for the corporation such as better accountability of IT assets, improved IT service levels, and more reliable risk management.

The integration of asset management and help desk solutions allows the IT technicianto log and troubleshoot problems as they arise.

Better Accountability

Improved ITService Levels

Reliable RiskManagement

05


The problem being, the manual nature of provisioning storage and altering the performance attributes of that storage is causing cracks in the working model.

Storage automation is a key enabler for enterprise infrastructure growth-allowing IT to meet expectations. It can perform the provisioning of storage and the adjustment of storage performance in a predictable, repeatable manner that can be done at scale, often outside of the storage system’s graphical user interface (GUI). The result of storage automation is a significant reduction in administrative time as well as a reduction in errors.

The data center has become the bedrock on which business value and competitive differentiation are built. Through it, the enterprise delivers IT services to employees; applications and services to customers, resources to DevOps teams, control to compliance officers, and agility to the enterprise.

The IT department therefore needs more efficient, less expensive ways to deploy and manage infrastructure to meet everyone’s demands.

The amount of data being created is soaring, putting pressure on data centers to keep pace with growth and application support demands. At the same time, IT is expected to become more agile and responsive to the needs of the business. Storage infrastructure is a foundational component that allows the IT professional to keep up with these growth elements and meet organizational expectations.

Data Center Operations Management

Storage Management

The problem being, the manual nature of provisioning storage and altering the performance attributes of that storage is causing cracks in the working model.

Storage automation is a key enabler for enterprise infrastructure growth-allowing IT to meet expectations. It can perform the provisioning of storage and the adjustment of storage performance in a predictable, repeatable manner that can be done at scale, often outside of the storage system’s graphical user interface (GUI). The result of storage automation is a significant reduction in administrative time as well as a reduction in errors.


Automation can also bring powerful monitoring, alerting, and reporting capabilities to your data center and ensure your operating systems achieve peak performance. It delivers the visibility you need into application performance and the underlying operating systems and servers they run on. Automation solutions can help track application availability across your physical and virtual infrastructure with built-in alerting and instant notification of issues.

A data center can have tens of thousands of compute, storage and network devices, presenting a large operational challenge to IT teams. It’s not enough to have a great and scalable network alone. In addition, IT needs to reduce operational expenses and increase responsiveness to changing business needs.

Automation is the key for simplifying network operations from provisioning to day-to-day management. Automation tools eliminate the need of additional resources needeed to amplify the work of each network operations engineer. Simultaneously, the programmatic operation of the network means that it is faster to provision new policies and services in the network.

Today automation has the capability to provide network management and provisioning capabilities that work at scale. Automation technologies can deliver network provisioning, automate workloads and guarantee consistent operations, and workflow.

Network Management

Traditionally, manual configuration is used to provision the network. However, as the network grows, an increasing number of individuals are involved, and in the coordination and communication of the process, errors get introduced. Moreover, automating initial and ongoing provisioning and network monitoring are effective ways to reduce human error.

OS Management

Without automation tools and technologies, operating system deployment projects do not scale well, and are inefficient and expensive. Even if great care is taken to manually document the steps necessary for each step in the deployment, errors may occur when deploying operating systems manually. Without automating operating system image creation and deployment testing, it is virtually impossible for administrators to deploy OS’s across data centers.


In case a ticket is nearing SLA or there are too many iterations for resolution between support staff and customer, workflow automation rules can be created for the ticket to be automatically escalated to your higher management for them to address.

Ticketing and Task Assignment

Every IT service desk has an assigned agent or admin. Enormous time is spent every day running through every incoming ticket, making sure they get categorized into right queues, prioritized, and assigned to the right agents within the team. Activities such as determining the right support agent for a new ticket resolution can be automated using rule based automation technology. Automation technology can also help in setting of status, priority and due date to tickets.

Customer Service Feedback and Reputation Management

The faster an issue is resolved, the better is the customer satisfaction. Directing the queries or incidents into the right channels ensures that they reach the right agent, faster, substantially reducing the time to resolution. Automation can make your responses as fast as instantaenous.

Automation can create a support experience that isn't possible when the enterprise processes are constrained by human capability. It that it allows you to provide a degree of responsiveness and consistency that isn't humanly possible. The best possible support experience incorporates the right mix of human contact and automation.

Help Desk Management

With help desk automation, your staff and admin get real-time alerts on incident requests, customer replies, staff assignment and more, through automated help desk notifications. By creating an automated workflow, you can set predefined conditions for tickets to be assigned to staff based on criticality, value of customer etc.

Automated help desks can improve the productivity of your support team by automating escalations and ticket reassignment based on your SLA, number of responses etc.

CUSTOMER SERVICE


User expectations from IT applications is continuously increasing. IT departments must deliver more quickly and at a constant level of quality, with a limited number of IT specialists.

Business users need self-service capabilities that help them get their jobs, faster and better. And, IT teams need to reduce costs by minimizing the number of personnel on-hand to process re lated requests. Provid ing di rect end-user interfaces to IT automation is an effective way to meet the needs of both groups.

Employing intuitive self-service solut ions means non-technical end-users can solve their own issues. Automat ion speeds up incident resolution and service request fulfillment with reduction in cost and a better customer experience, there are also a number of other potential benefits to be realized:

User Self-service

A reduction in human error: People make mistakes-after all “to err is human.” The benefit here is not so much avoiding the error itself but the unwanted consequences, i.e. the business impact of the error.

Greater ability to change: People get used to working in a particular way, and adapting to a new way of working may not be easy. And sometimes, the new way of working is a strange hybrid of both new and old. However, automation allows processes and procedures to rapidly, and consistently, adapt as both business and IT needs change.

1

2

Better people utilization: Firstly, as fewer people are needed due to the introduction of automation, organizations can better cope with the predicted shortage of suitable IT professionals. Secondly, automation allows the enterprise resources to disengage from repetetive and often mundane tasks, to focus on more productive work.

3


Self-service Maintenance and Admin Tasks

Users can be provided greater control of their account and their IT capacity by giving them access to simple portals from which they can manage everyday IT processes such as resetting a password or creating users. By enabling them to a self-service channel, the dependence of IT and support is less-result ing in better productivi ty.

Report Generation

Users requiring daily reporting can be provided with a self-service portal to generate their own reports and choose to view the information they need. Customized reports can be automatically generated-not only improving resource utilization but providing intuitive insights into process improvement.

Provisioning

By enabling customers provision additional services as required, they are are enabled with more control of their own environment. With automated service orchestration, users can benefit from the agile delivery of services on-premise, in the cloud or hybrid environments, without the delays and errors associated with manual tasks and hand-offs. This offers a single point of control for full-stack service delivery, the assurance of process and configuration compliance, and the opportunity to provision, update, change and patch with one solution. The IT teams will still be available for users who choose to call them, but it is widely accepted that the convenience of enabling this process through a self-service portal has proved to be very popular.


Agile processes are accelerating the evolution of automated service management, with service management itself evolving to adapt to automation. There is a symbiotic relationship between these movements. True agility in business is not feasible without automation, and it is becoming increasingly obvious that service management in any form will be impossible without automation and the inherent benefits such as:

Reduction in IT operational costs.

The ability to proactively respond to the shrinking "available resource pool."

Freeing highly skilled and knowledgeable staff from the repeatable, mundane tasks.

Transforming IT service management by leveraging automation brings with it a number of benefit-enhancing advantages: It helps to remove human dependency, resource costs, and human error; it speeds the time to enact a given process; and it results in a better IT service delivery experience and a better customer experience. It is becoming increasingly evident that as technology evolves, the adoption of automation in IT service management will become essential to the success of any organization.

CONCLUSION

CMS IT is one of India’s leading IT services firms with 30 branches and 220 direct support locations in India. We offer automated IT service management infrastructure that serve large corporations across all sectors, including banking, insurance, retail, telecom and manufacturing, CMS IT provides innovative, cost-effective and best-in-class automated IT service management solutions that are reliable, resilient and responsive.

As a premium provider of end-to-end automated IT service management solutions covering the entire spectrum of ITSM, CMS IT focuses on helping organizations become proactive and efficient. CMS IT Services' end-user IT support Services are designed to provide streamlined services to end-users across locations for your business and improve end-user productivity.

We provide a standardized process including on-site IT support for your end-user environment. Our 24x7 support services include desktop management, OS management, office automation applications, business applications, troubleshooting LAN issues and IT technical support services.

ABOUT US

TO LEARN MORE ABOUTHOW OUR AUTOMATED IT SERVICE MANAGEMENTSOLUTIONS CAN HELP YOUR BUSINESS,CONTACT OUR ITSM SPECIALISTS @

c a l l : + 9 1 - 8 0 - 3 0 4 3 - 0 3 0 0 E M A I L : i n q u i r y @ c m s i t s e r v i c e s . c o m .


QUICKLINKS

ServicesPracticesResourcesCustomersAbout UsContact Us

CONTACT INFO

CMS IT ServicesNo. 236, (Old Sy No. 291-92 / 1A)Konappa Agrahara Village,Begur Hobli, Bangalore South Taluk,Electronics City, Phase I,Bangalore- 560 100, Karnataka

12

Documents

Transforming Management with Automation...possible support experience incorporates the right mix of human contact and automation. Help Desk Management With help desk automation, your