Wearable tech has come a long way in the last 5 years, and people have embraced the idea that they can track their sleep, exercise, heart rate and hundreds of other data points. Each day, it helps motivate people to achieve their fitness and health goals, and live better lives.
A continuous assessment is the Apple Watch for your core infrastructure. Constantly discovering, monitoring and measuring the very heartbeat of organization’s critical infrastructure. These three actions help reduce workload, reduce unplanned outages, and increase visibility of performance.
Discovery:
As your environment grows, so does the complexity. Having proper MAC (Move, Add, Change) processes are a must, not every MAC is captured as part of these processes. Knowing about these MACs as they appear in your infrastructure reduces the risk of outages, security flaws, and increases the ability of the organization to maintain proper asset, configuration and change management.
Monitor:
Monitoring is something almost every organization has, but very few organizations have a standard around monitoring. Monitoring should go beyond just Up/Down status (while critical), and expand into compliance and configuration checks, application data flow, and performance of WAN, LAN and cloud infrastructures.
Measuring:
You can only fix what you can measure. Most organizations are so busy dealing with daily fires, that measurement is an afterthought, or nice to have. Measurement, like an apple watch, provides critical information about trends, improvements, and areas to re-focus efforts. Measuring also allows visibility to leadership, in non-technical ways that helps with understanding and over time and help with budget allocation and a seat at the table for IT.
When an organization performs an assessment, they are trying to understand what they currently have, how it is working and possibly what could be done better. But these assessments are snapshots, and not days, months, and years of data points. A continuous assessment is an apple watch for your business’s critical IT and cloud infrastructure that will highlight your strengths, weaknesses, and allow you and your team the data required to fix problems and get off the hamster wheel of fighting daily and weekly fires.