Chapter One Preview: Understanding RBA and What It Delivers

Operational efficiency and effectiveness in the business environment requires a keen understanding of the complex nature and interactions among software, hardware, and personnel. It is also necessary to automate as many processes as possible with a definable, repeatable pattern of execution or flow as possible. Today’s complex IT systems contain more constants and variables than any single human mind can process and comprehend in a meaningful way, simply because humans are ill-equipped to handle so much information at once.

Within modern IT operations, there is tremendous unharnessed potential. There are also immense gaps among diverse, multi-disciplinary architectures, infrastructures, and platforms in use. To compound these problems, IT must cope with rapid proliferation of issues related to absorbing existing business infrastructures, acquiring new equipment, dealing with human error, and working from an often incomplete view of centralized management and task automation across heterogeneous environments.

ITPA represents the convergence between routine tasks and best practice initiatives addressed through software-centric approaches. Traditionally, automated interactions have been handled using batch scripting and on-site custom programming tools and techniques. Modern computing and telecommunications enterprises process millions of transactions through diverse organizational infrastructures and various systems that execute thousands of different tasks, many of which are similar in nature, though individual execution details may differ. Establishing cohesive operation and centralized software management across an entire IT infrastructure and all its various components and elements presents significant challenges, particularly during routine system maintenance, and can drain resources and time. In fact, task automation’s biggest appeal is the time and effort it frees so that IT staff can do more than put out fires or deal with the crisis du jour.

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Chapter Two Preview: Key Ingredients for RBA Systems

Modern business and utility computing incorporates numerous layers of technology, which by itself creates several discrete pockets of and serviceable levels for automation. In terms of IT operations oversight, there is no individual component, nor combination of components perhaps more important than a coherent and holistic perspective on data center management. This is particularly true when it comes to process automation and incident handling. Centralized management with service provisioning is both central to and instrumental for the next generation of enterprise computing management development.

Achieving an organic self-sustaining IT infrastructure is possible, but it seldom comes easily, cheaply or instantly. The trick to designing an appropriate all-purpose IT management solution comes from developing the technology that assists enterprise and government organizations in moving beyond tools restricted to disparate and disjoint IT domains. This enables such outfits to work across isolated IT infrastructure silos, and to improve day-to-day operational efficiencies across the board. By the same token, well-orchestrated run book procedures also eliminate more error-prone, labor-intensive processes and can deliver services both more efficiently and cost-effectively—starting at the ground level and working upward from there.

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Chapter Three Preview: Common RBA Use Cases

RBA provides the ability to automate, create, define, document, orchestrate, manage, and report
on workflows that support orderly scheduled or event-driven execution of system and network
processes. RBA processes transcend IT disciplinary boundaries and establish interactivity across
diverse infrastructure elements (including applications, databases, services, and hardware) to
apply IT best business practices across an enterprise. RBA processes also provide tighter
software integration, improve IT service levels, and automate resource provisioning through
event- and process-driven workflows.

RBA significantly enhances efficiency levels, particularly for routine or regularly repeated
business operations, and permits easy automation of manual procedures. Specific alerts, events,
and incidents may be captured, monitored, and examined—by man, machine, or both—to
identify better methods for managing and maintaining workflows. Furthermore, RBA integrates
business components tightly and acts as an industrial-strength adhesive to bind large
heterogeneous IT environments. All in all, RBA helps businesses handle the enormous and
complex administrative challenge that goes by seemingly innocuous names such as “IT
operations,” “IT Service Support,” “IT Service Delivery,” and “ICT Infrastructure Management”
(ICT stands for Information and Communication Technology), to pick up key elements from the
ITIL v3 Framework.

Certain RBA solutions can even execute multiple aspects of IT procedures in parallel while
simultaneously synchronizing intercommunication between or among them, and can escalate
selected events for administrator attention according to specific triggers, event severity levels,
threshold values, or even for particular combinations of events. All RBA solutions perpetually
measure, monitor, and maintain enterprise-wide performance levels to help ensure that SLAs are
met. Another competitive advantage of certain RBA solutions is their ability to analyze
workflow procedures to reduce end-to-

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