Systems management: getting rapid return on investment from System Center

System Center 2012 R2 is now experiencing solid uptake across organisations of all sizes. Its comprehensive range of systems management features offer a huge array of business benefits, addressing many IT departments’ top concerns, such as:

• Managing mobile devices belonging to employees (BYOD) or to the organisation – with features including remote wipe for lost devices, and automated deployment across a wide variety of devices running Android, iOS and Windows Mobile
• Offering a centralised view of infrastructure provisioning and monitoring, application performance monitoring, hardware monitoring and network monitoring, rather than requiring a different management console for each
• Standardising the ways in which virtual machines are deployed, regardless of whether they are on-premise, hosted or cloud-based
• Maximising the productive use of IT resources with user self-service and automation, removing the burden of repetitive, low-value work.

In 2013, Microsoft commissioned a business value analysis of System Center 2012 Configuration Manager, based on the experience of early adopter organisations using it as their main systems management tool. You can read the report here.

The benefits System Center 2012 Configuration Manager delivered these organisations were impressive, showing demonstrable value in slashing annual labour costs of IT professionals by:

• Eliminating the need for them to perform tasks that can be automated
• Streamlining activities to reduce the time taken for common tasks.

Clearer visibility over all infrastructure allowed organisations to better understand their physical and virtual server environments, and to consolidate them as appropriate. Significant costs savings were achieved by retiring unneeded physical servers – saving licensing fees, administration costs and operating costs such as power.

Adoption of the System Center family of products will simplify the adoption of Public Cloud, providing elasticity and automation to move virtual infrastructure to Microsoft Azure, while still being able to monitor and manage across Private, Hybrid and Public Cloud.

Additional benefits accrued from improved security, reduced time spent generating customised reports and better visibility over assets and inventory.

Configuration Manager is part of the overall System Center 2012 suite. Deployment of the entire suite can be complex and time-consuming, but Data^#3 offers a Rapid deployment model which provides initial value from common tasks, while supporting progressive rollout of System Center applications across the organisation.