Today managing and maintaining your IT infrastructure can put a big dent in operational costs and staff utilization. Hardly good news when the bottom line calls for focusing on core business functions rather than worrying about IT management issues. Yet without IT management, threats like downtime, outages and bottlenecks can severely hurt productivity. And for companies with limited in-house technical resources, not being able to detect and solve technical issues can make the problem even worse.

IBM Express™ Remote Managed Infrastructure Services (ERMIS) takes the pain and high cost out of keeping IT infrastructures—from individual CPUs to entire networks—healthy around the clock. These scalable services remotely monitor, manage and report on problems, vulnerabilities, intrusions and capacity with proven technology and methodologies that keep data consistently available.

What you get

ERMIS services address five essential components of today's IT infrastructures. Midsized businesses can choose from any or all of the services, which are managed remotely by highly qualified IBM experts. Each of these services comes with near real-time dashboards that graphically illustrate activities and key performance indicators (KPIs) essential to a healthy IT infrastructure. These services cover:

• Network connection availability: analyzes memory usage and performance metrics of routers and switches.
• Continuous server access: monitors performance statistics such as availability, resource use by CPU, memory, disk, process and bandwidth.
• Optimal application usage: keeps tabs on service availability and memory usage vital for keeping business software up and running.
• Application infrastructure uptime: monitors utilization and access speed of environments that host multiple business software applications.
• Unified communications access: determines and remediates infrastructure issues that can slow collaboration; monitoring information is delivered through a centralized, browser-based portal.

Each of these services comes with guaranteed service-level agreements (SLAs). When an error occurs in an infrastructure component, ERMIS automatically generates a trouble ticket and notifies the appropriate in-house users, as well as IBM and business partner IT experts. Agentless monitoring, which requires no additional software to be installed on the premises, helps ensure that deployment is rapid and nondisruptive. Data privacy is ensured by virtual private networks (VPNs) and dedicated channel connections to ERMIS solutions.

Reality check

IT availability is vital for competitiveness in today's always-on economy. ERMIS helps ensure continuous data access for revenue-producing activities that rely on information. With these services, midsized companies can depend on data that increases productivity and market agility. And there's more to the story than data reliability. ERMIS monitoring and management also helps secure critical business information from security threats by monitoring the health of small and large IT components—whether an individual CPU or an entire network.

These services can be used to reduce operational costs, too. As IT infrastructures grow more complex, management and upkeep tasks typically become more complicated as well—which can incur unforeseen labor costs. For about the cost of one in-house technology professional, ERMIS can provide subject matter experts to manage and monitor an entire IT infrastructure. In addition to trimming anticipated hires and training costs, leveraging the expertise of ERMIS experts can free in-house IT staff to work on revenue-producing tasks.

The need to rely on more than one vendor to monitor IT infrastructure components can often be eliminated. ERMIS enhances operational efficiencies with faster problem determination and remediation through a single, integrated, security-rich portal into virtually all IT operations that includes dedicated help-desk support in addition to constant, automatic monitoring.

A menu approach to services allows ERMIS to be tailored to specific environments, so midsized companies pay for the solutions needed. These choices also let businesses scale their monitoring capabilities as the need arises—and help maximize the IT investments being monitored.

Designed for the bottom line

Beyond improving IT infrastructure availability and performance at low cost, ERMIS helps IT costs become predictable—while preserving investments in existing technology. A global delivery model that uses agentless technology—so no additional software is required—can free budget for other areas where it may be better allocated for capturing new opportunities.

These services are ideal for smaller companies, organizations with 100 to 1,000 employees. ERMIS offerings are competitively priced and available through local IBM business partners. In addition to low price points, ERMIS offerings also pay for themselves—preserving the value of IT investments by keeping them up and running. And with consistent data access, midsized businesses can be assured of keeping operations running smoothly and productively.

To learn more about IBM Express Remote Managed Infrastructure Services, please contact an IBM Rep at 1-877-IBM-ACCESS (1-877-426-2223) to help you connect with the right IBM and IBM Business Partner resources.