GSN Magazine June 2016 Digital Edition

is impacted by other components.
By working with tools
that provide a common operating
picture across your IT
infrastructure as a whole, you
will be able to quickly identify
interdependencies. Without
it, you have no insight on how
something in your cloud environment
(for example) may
affect something within your
physical infrastructure.
4. Complete a “Cloud Ready
Assessment.” A cloud ready
assessment considers all aspects
of moving to the cloud,
including increased IT complexity,
security, upgrade
costs, consultancy costs, and
new integrations required – as
well as unified monitoring,
training, increased agility to
meet mission demands and
any expected IT efficiency
gains.
5. Use tools, whether open
source or commercial, for
actionable intelligence to support
your decisions on whether
mission readiness is being
compromised. Commercial
tools that have been built on
an open architecture typically
provide the deepest levels of
functionality, scalability and
flexibility and will allow an
agencies to more easily shift
to support changing mission
strategies and IT requirements
without having to rip
and replace.
6. Determine whether your IT
monitoring needs are best met
by open source or commercial
solutions. Open source solutions
are a growing trend in
monitoring. By working with
tools based on open architecture,
agencies aren’t locked
into any particular vendor
stack and can readily shift
from one cloud provider to
another. Unless your program
requirements are extremely
unusual, it seldom makes financial
sense to develop what
a commercial provider has
previously developed, deployed
and is able to support.
Make your best choice of what
works for your organization, but
understand that there is an argument
for both agencies and contractors
to give up the traditional
approach to managing IT infrastructures
as they move to the
cloud.
Cloud era monitoring tools
29
provide the ability to monitor
both physical and cloud from a
single platform. And over time,
you’ll need to show that your
IT management plans take the
cloud mandate into account
while managing your agencies
budgetary constraints. Adopting
monitoring tools that can monitor
both environments ensures
you stay compliant with technology
mandates.
As agencies embrace cloud environments,
unified monitoring
is becoming even more essential.
No matter what’s in your physical
and cloud environments,
monitoring can reduce the number
and severity of impacts to the
trusted services you offer both
your personnel and the citizens
of the United States.
Adelle Rydman is Director Federal
Business for Zenoss. She can
be reached arydman@zenoss.com