As our IT systems become ever more complex, with more data, devices and ways of working, the demands on our systems and ensuring they are always operating efficiently grow. This in turn presents us and our IT teams with a whole new range of management challenges.
Systems management has always been a challenge for organisations, how do we keep on top of an ever-increasing amount of systems ? how do we ensure they remain secure and patched ? and how do we cope with our users and their multitude of devices and ensure we can effectively look after them?.
Like most of our technology, systems management is changing, but how? And what should we expect from future management solutions?
That’s the subject of this weeks podcast, as I’m joined by returning guest Dave Sobel. Dave is Senior Director of Community at SolarWinds MSP, working with SolarWinds partners and customers to ensure they deliver a great service.
As part of this role, Dave is also charged with looking at the future (not the distant future, but the near future of the next 2 years) of systems management and what these platforms need to include in them to continue to be relevant and useful.
Dave provides some excellent insight into the way the management market is shifting and some of the technology trends that will change and improve the way we control our ever more complex yet crucial IT systems.
We start by asking why looking at the future is such an important part of the IT strategists role, whether you are a CIO, IT Director, or any person who makes technology direction strategy decisions, if you are not taking a look at future trends, it will seriously limit your ability to make good technology decisions.
We see why we need to rethink how we see a “computer” and how this is leading to a proliferation of different devices with the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) as well as looking at why that is such a horrible phrase and how this is affecting our ability to manage.
We discuss the part Artificial Intelligence is going to play in future systems management as we try to supplement our over stretched IT staff and provide them with ways of analysing ever more data and turning it into something useful.
We also investigate increased automation, looking at how our management systems can be more flexible in supporting new devices as they are added to our systems, as well as been smarter in the way we can apply management to all of our devices.
Finally, we look at the move to human centric management, instead of our systems been built to support devices, we need to be able to understand the person who uses the technology, and build our management and controls around them, allowing us to provide them with better management and importantly a better technology experience.
We wrap up looking at how smarter systems management is going to allow us to free our IT teams to provide increased value to the business, as well as looking at a couple of areas you can focus on today, to start to look at the way you manage your systems.
To find more from Dave you can follow him on twitter @djdaveet
You will find Dave’s Blog is here
I hope you found the chat as interesting as I did.
Until next time, thanks for listening.
Techstringy 