Companies often use a wide range of tech products offered by an equally wide range of companies to accomplish different tasks — however, effectively managing these varied systems takes organized, strategic planning.
The tech we use in the workplace is produced by a much larger number of developers than in the past, meaning that your office runs on a much more diverse array of software. That variety of products makes it easier for different systems to tackle different tasks more fluidly and efficiently than others — while one system may track client orders most effectively, for instance, another may take the cake in the accounting department.
Yet, oddly enough, many successful companies struggle to make these disparate systems “talk” to each other. Whether due to a lack of appropriate skillsets or nonoptimal management techniques, setbacks in this department can be disruptive and potentially damaging to a business, no matter how large or established. To combat this potentially destructive problem, companies must learn to stay flexible yet cohesive in their approach to the technology they rely on.
A Mixed Bag
This concept is referred to as a heterogeneous environment, as PC Magazine explains. Rather than use tech services provided by a single company — which would make for a homogeneous environment — nimble companies are opting to use a range of vendors when purchasing servers, networks, and hardware.
There are a number of reasons why using a more assorted suite of tech products is advantageous. For one, it allows capacity planners to fine-tune their operations in order to ensure maximum utilization rates, as Investopedia details. This way, IT departments can hand-pick the elements they think will combine to provide their users the fastest and most convenient service possible.
This ability to make informed choices about the many different aspects of a company’s IT services — including applications, databases, cloud providers, storage, and server speed, among others — is challenging, to say the least. As such, any company looking to streamline their services will be asking a lot of their IT department.
According to Enterprise Networking Planet, heterogeneous environments require the participation of highly skilled professionals who are able to fluently manage multiple operating systems and hardware, combining them into a more powerful and unified force.
A Team Effort
IT leaders must be able to track and identify problems across platforms, using their wide-ranging skills to locate ineffective elements. They need a nuanced understanding of which systems are most compatible and what configurations work best. This, in turn, requires closely monitoring your multi-vendor environment and keeping tabs on how each piece of the puzzle is working.
While collating and analyzing your data streams can help, the art of running a heterogeneous work environment takes foresight and an ability to locate problems before they arise — which takes a serious amount of background knowledge and skill. And while many IT departments have the talent to keep individual systems running, making them work together with maximum efficiency often takes a helping hand.
Vityl Capacity Management may be exactly what your company needs. Vityl supplements your existing technology plan by collecting and analyzing data, and then using it to accurately predict future performance results. By examining which specific elements of your system produce what results, you can locate and solve problems much more quickly and effectively. We can also file those results for future use, allowing you to follow (or avoid) historical trends.
The level of skill required to effectively manage a heterogeneous environment can be prohibitive — Vityl Capacity Management offers the ability to combine your disparate tech silos into one cohesive, optimal unit. The rest, as they say, is history.