How DCIM Addresses Hybrid IT Management Challenges For CIOs

In this digital transformation age, it has become clearer than light of day, that the role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) is changing everyday. The role of today’s CIO is expanding and becoming more challenging.

One of the areas that have had the role of the CIO change drastically is Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM). According to a White Paper released by Schneider Electric, Modern DCIM looks to help CIOs address management challenges within Distributed, Hybrid IT Environments. The paper also highlights the rapidly-changing role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) as IT has taken center stage in the past few years.

The success of a CIO is ultimately rooted in a solid foundation of maintaining resilient, secure, and sustainable IT operations. In an environment of highly distributed hybrid IT, this goal becomes harder to accomplish.

Patrick Donovan, the Senior Research Analyst at Schneider Electric’s Energy Management Research Centre who also worked on the white paper believes that business requirements are forcing CIOs to hybridize their data centre and IT portfolio architecture. The CIOs do this by placing IT capacity in colocation facilities and building out capacity at the local edge.

“CIOs have always been tasked with managing and maintaining resilient and secure operations, but generally have been focused on core data center sites. Now, on top of having many more distributed sites needing resiliency and security, they are also being asked to report on the sustainability of their IT operations. This marks real sea change in terms of their responsibilities,” Donovan said.

In the paper, Donovan further describes the evolution of enterprise IT portfolios and explores the resulting management challenges. He explains how modern DCIM software has evolved and is more optimized for increasingly distributed environments. Distributed IT makes security a top concern along with the need for improved resiliency and tracking and reporting of the IT operation’s environmental impact.

In the white paper, Schenider Electric also introduced its new TradeOff Tool, the DCIM Monitoring Value Calculator for Distributed IT, which provides user-selectable inputs and adjustable assumptions to perform ‘what-if’ scenarios to see the ROI/payback of monitoring software. It considers factors like downtime, staffing, security, environmental incidents, and cashflow.

“We wanted to create a useful framework to help customers quantify the potential value of DCIM in their operations and we are excited for them to try our tool,” said TradeOff Tool creator Wendy Torell, Senior Research Analyst at Schneider Electric’s Energy Management Research Center. “We designed it to be user friendly and it easily adapts to the customer’s specific environment and level of maturity.”

Donovan, Torell, and fellow members of the Energy Management Resource Center conduct research that helps Schneider Electric and its customers make informed business and technology decisions backed by facts and research. Much of the research is made freely available to the public.