With more Australian businesses favouring digital transformation, Application Resource Management (ARM) is increasingly important. When hybrid teams need access to distributed IT infrastructure, it’s more difficult to maintain visibility across your network.
ARM uses activity and output analysis to evaluate the inner workings of your systems. It’s most widely adopted to optimise cloud spend, but it can also reduce network and team inefficiencies by cutting resource waste and freeing up time with automation.
Despite its growing popularity, many organisations we speak to don’t realise the root of their problems is a lack of strategic ARM. Here are some common red flags that might be jeopardising the ability to optimise your IT infrastructure:
1. You’re hearing complaints downstream
If your end-users, or sales and marketing teams complain about subpar application performance, you likely have a problem with ARM. Downtime, slow loading speed and errors all indicate bottlenecks due to resource constrained or bottlenecked applications.
ARM provides insight into which applications are draining resources and which are at capacity. Using this information, it then automates dynamic resourcing to optimise your system’s performance and boost end-user satisfaction.
2. You don’t know how your network’s performing
If even a single application is not being monitored, you don’t know where your resources are going. Without this insight, you can’t predict how – or even if – your network will perform optimally. It’s also difficult to calculate ROI and evaluate team efficiency without this information.
ARM uses output data to predict resourcing and maintain optimal operationality. It gives your business critical insight into what your infrastructure needs and where.
3. Your applications are inconsistent
If you are monitoring your applications, but they seem to vary under different workloads, that may also be a resource management problem.
In the same way that ARM tools give you visibility across your infrastructure environment, they ensure your applications always have enough capacity to function.
4. You don’t know where your IT spend goes
Increasing ROI is one of the primary drivers behind organisations looking to strategise their ARM. Without the insights it provides, you cannot effectively optimise your cloud or IT infrastructure spend.
By identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies across your network, ARM gives you the oversight to make your budget go further.
5. Your IT infrastructure strategy is reactive and problem-focused
The true power of ARM lies in its ability to dynamically allocate resources for optimal efficiency. With the process automated as much as you like, IT teams have time to proactively work on enhancing your IT infrastructure for maximum efficiency.
Aligning organisation-wide goals with this new, proactive way of working makes IT teams happier and more valuable from a business perspective. If goals relate to customer experience, for example, then the ability to identify performance degradation (before it becomes noticeable) equips teams across the business to enhance usability.
6. You can’t find the cause of issues quickly
If you spend a lot of time searching for the cause of problems across your infrastructure environment, you likely have an issue with ARM. Using automation, ARM instantly identifies the source of any issue and works to rectify it.
Effective ARM tools offer custom dashboards that are your single source of truth. These are user-focused to make finding the cause of the problem – as well as recommended solutions – simple. The right tooling will also allow you to respond to incidents systematically.
7. Your teams struggle to innovate and scale
A key benefit of an effective ARM strategy is the impact it has on employees. Without ARM, IT teams spend large portions of their workday tracking metrics like response time, latency and resource availability.
IT teams that are bogged down with these tedious manual tasks quickly become unmotivated and unproductive. With the right tooling automating manual tasks, those employees are free to work on critical projects for business growth.
8. You’re still managing compliance manually
Businesses that don’t use ARM to automate compliance risk are missing out on a huge resource saver. Multiple SLAs across a complicated network make manual risk assessments, audits and incident response extremely unreliable and time-consuming.
ARM can optimise compliance by proactively identifying anomalies and areas for improvement. Using this information, it guides compliance managers from a single source, making it easy for teams to spot anomalies.
Advent One: When you don’t know where to start
The biggest barrier we hear from customers that have been considering implementing Application Resource Management protocols and technology is that they don’t know what exactly they need to change. Partnering with a hybrid cloud and automation expert like Advent One gives you the freedom to achieve your goals without the need for additional hiring and training resources.
Advent One has partnerships with a range of ARM technology providers, including Red Hat, IBM Turbonomic and Dynatrace. By partnering with us, you can bridge the skills and time gap standing in the way of your streamlined, optimised infrastructure.
For more information on how Advent One uses ARM tooling to optimise your cloud-based environment, come and speak to our expert team at the Cloud & IT Infrastructure Summit at Doltone House, Sydney on the 25th July. We’ll be located at the Coffee Cart, you won’t miss us!