Assessing the operational risks of virtualisation

In a 2008 report on virtualisation, Gartner predicted: "Virtualisation will be the highest-impact trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012".1 Today, virtualisation and the various benefits it offers to the enterprise are top of mind for business and IT leaders looking to optimise their operations.

As with all groundbreaking developments in the IT world, however, virtualisation also has a number of challenges associated with it. If these issues are not dealt with effectively, organisations could end up with solutions that consume significant resources while failing to deliver the expected benefits.

"By considering the technical and operations risks inherent in any virtualisation strategy, companies can limit the potentially negative impacts while extending the benefits to deliver maximum effectiveness," says Rob Picton, Dimension Data's product manager for operations management. "Proactively identifying and addressing these risks at the start of a project is the optimal strategy to facilitate the rapid and successful adoption of virtual technology in business, both now and in the future."

Picton believes there are three primary areas associated with the adoption of virtualisation driving operational risk into businesses:

1. Existing management tools may not be compatible with the virtualisation element manager. The organisation's existing service management tools may be able to discover virtual machines, but will be unable to collect detailed information and implement existing management processes. This results in the physical and virtual domains being managed independently, which in turn negatively affects an organisation's ability to find the root cause of faults and manage application performance across the whole infrastructure.
2. Processes may be poorly defined or immature. Virtualisation brings substantial operational changes to the business environment due to the speed of deploying and moving fully functional virtual machines. Traditional processes may not be able to address the virtual environment effectively.
3. Lack of skills creates additional operations risks. The more virtualisation is implemented, the more skills are needed in what is still a fairly new technical field.

Failing to deal with these challenges at the start of the project will increase the cost of the rollout and reduce its effectiveness.

The way to overcome these challenges is by understanding the impact they will have on business operations and develop strategies to overcome them before the project is hamstrung. An IT service management (ITSM) risk assessment for virtualisation is the optimal approach to defining and mitigating the risks business faces.

This assessment probes the core of the organisation's service management environment, covering technology, processes and people (skills). The maturity and capability of these three areas are analysed in context of the progress and desired outcome of the virtualisation project and the impact they could have in future.

"The assessment will help business identify the service management tools being used (technology), the process maturity in place and the skills available for IT operations to accurately define the operational risk for each of these areas in a virtualisation project," adds Picton. "It's important to also analyse these three areas in the context of future plans and expectations to avoid the risks increasing and unexpectedly impeding operations as the solution expands.

"This allows management to identify the gaps that exist between the capabilities available and those required to effectively manage IT operations in the current and planned virtual environment. In some cases, it may be possible to initially gain the desired advantages of virtualisation without an overall strategy, but this approach simply leaves the company vulnerable in future, as it is forced to rework its current infrastructure to mitigate operational risks that only appear in expansion projects."

Detailed recommendations from the assessment builds a roadmap of how to address present and future risks with the view that, once applied, risk will be reduced and the organisation will be in an ideal position to deploy and use virtualisation more pervasively and gain the benefits desired.

In its 2008 report, Gartner states that virtualisation will touch every aspect of the IT environment. Ideally, every individual element of the IT infrastructure will be considered as part of the virtualisation strategy in the planning phase. However, this holistic approach entails a carefully scoped solution that can take a long time to roll out.

Due to the complexity and time requirements inherent in these projects, many organisations rely on their IT integrators to provide the specialist expertise and skills required to ensure a successful and sustained deployment. Integrators are focused on the technical aspects business requires, allowing customers to gain the advantages offered by virtualisation without losing focus on their core business.