This article is the fourth and final installment in our series on Multidomain Architectures, the IT Manhattan Project, and Delivering The “Real” Zero Trust. You can find the first three parts here.
We’ve laid out the case for deploying a multidomain architectural approach to secure, modernize, and transform federal IT environments. As we close out this series, we’ll take a moment to note some key integrations and sensical automation that can be used to achieve improved outcomes. Software-defined controllers are further empowered by taking the actionable telemetry that they’ve ingested and subjecting it to AI/ML Engines for further baselining and evaluation. Production baselines become more and more refined, thus making the abnormalities stand out more prominently. The data can then be turned into actionable insights that can trigger automated runbooks geared at remediating common Tier-1 / Tier-2 operational issues. Through basic ITSM Integrations, these same triggered automated remediation runbooks can also include steps to automatically create and update ITSM Ticketing when Tier-1 issues are discovered and remediated.
Software-defined controllers that interface with their respective domains are architecturally positioned to play a key role in further brokering Day-2 Operations optimization for all silos of IT represented in the environment that it manages. These controllers gain visibility into campus networks, data center infrastructure, security infrastructure, and OT/ICS infrastructure. It is this same strategic positioning in the architectural flow that positions them perfectly for operational optimizations. In addition to remediation automation, they can use similar insights and analytics to make further strides towards closed loop optimization to improve overall multidomain user experience, realize true end-to-end performance monitoring, and baselining application dependencies.
As you build workflows to support full-stack optimization and automation, power can be exponentially increased when performing strategic integrations with 3rd party application performance monitoring tools and other API integrations. Return on Investment can be realized rather quickly when analytics and optimization data begin optimizing workloads to consume fewer resources and subscriptions. Key results can be realistically realized, and may include:
- Reduction in IT operating expenditures because of optimizing infrastructure usage and streamlining license consumption.
- Shifting engineering resources away from low-level troubleshooting and directed towards more cerebral tasks requiring human intervention.
By utilizing these software-defined controllers to add fidelity to data sets gathered from multiple domains, key cross-domain insights, and automated actions, a drastic shift in IT Ops is possible. When coupling that with the power of multidomain architectures as a whole, we can realistically achieve IT transformation while preparing our IT organizations for the unpredictable challenges that undoubtedly exist ahead of us.
