DMSO Emerging As a New Industry Category That Elevates IT Infrastructure Management Managing mixed environments is becoming more difficult all the time due to budget constraints and the need to manage a complicated network of service providers to ensure accountability and support

As businesses continue their digital transformation journey, they depend on data that increasingly resides in a complex ecosystem: on-premises, in public and private clouds, on edge devices, and within global networks. Managing these mixed environments is becoming more difficult all the time due to budget constraints and the need to manage a complicated network of service providers to ensure accountability and support.

An emerging opportunity

The Indian data center market size is expected to reach $1.5 billion by 2022 from $1.0 billion in 2018, at a compounded annual growth rate of 11.4 per cent during the forecast period as per Markets and Markets. In a market where data centre and network maintenance is expected to grow annually, it's time for the industry to address digital IT infrastructure servicing in harmony with third-party maintenance (TPM) or risk not optimizing the opportunities digital transformation presents. That is especially true as a new market category evolves—discover, monitor, support and optimize (DMSO)—which according to industry analysts is expected to be worth $228 billion annually by 2023.

For the industry to address these trends, it is crucial to recognize the significant transformation that data centres have undergone in the last decade. The concept of infrastructure continues to evolve radically as businesses embrace digital transformation. In this digital era, more than ever, companies must emphasize identifying and addressing problems before they happen. It's also critical to avoid the mistake of exclusively focusing on applications. Physical infrastructure is still the foundation of the digital world, whether it is on-premises, in a hosted environment, or with a cloud provider.

What is DMSO?

DMSO is a new industry category that elevates IT infrastructure services to accelerate business transformation. Through a single pane of glass, DMSO offers a view up and down the technology stack including hardware, operating systems, networks, databases, applications, and the cloud, for customers to:

Discover: Holistic, accurate listing of data center assets across OEMs, with automated IT asset discovery and dependency mapping and comprehensive coverage of servers (physical, virtual, and cloud), desktops, edge devices, and peripherals.

Monitor: Server, and storage monitoring hardware (storage, server, and network) and software (OS Monitoring, Linux, Windows, VM).

Support: Event filtering and remediation for hardware, operating systems, and network hardware (predictive/proactive alerting and ticket integration), OS remediation (patch management, updates), and network incidents (management, configuration, root cause).

Optimize: Enable client efficiencies and ensure uptime with capacity management, CPU utilization, and cloud cost controls.

Realizing the full value of digital transformation

Therefore, a strategic approach to maintain physical and virtual infrastructures—to maintain application uptime—as well as gaining insights through automation and analytics is required. Once established, that approach can help enterprises shift more of their scarce budget towards innovation and help turn the IT function into a strategic business asset.

Recognising and embracing the emergence of this new industry category presents the opportunity for IT Infrastructure providers to deliver a service like never before. The industry can no longer ignore the opportunity we have, at this moment, to maximise uptime, create cost efficiencies, enable greater infrastructure control and visibility, and enhance asset performance through support. This is a critical area that could help enterprises realise the full value of digital transformation and the growth that comes with it.