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Scott Arnett is an Information Technology & Security Professional Executive with over 30 years experience in IT. Scott has worked in various industries such as health care, insurance, manufacturing, broadcast, printing, and consulting and in enterprises ranging in size from $50M to $20B in revenue. Scott’s experience encompasses the following areas of specialization: Leadership, Strategy, Architecture, Business Partnership & Acumen, Process Management, Infrastructure and Security. With his broad understanding of technology and his ability to communicate successfully with both Executives and Technical Specialists, Scott has been consistently recognized as someone who not only can "Connect the Dots", but who can also create a workable solution. Scott is equally comfortable playing technical, project management/leadership and organizational leadership roles through experience gained throughout his career. Scott has previously acted in the role of CIO, CTO, and VP of IT, successfully built 9 data centers across the country, and is expert in understanding ITIL, PCI Compliance, SOX, HIPAA, FERPA, FRCP and COBIT.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Forgotten Front?

The corporate enterprise has a great deal of applications, systems, and data to maintain each day.  To help maintain those assets, they bring performance management and capacity planning management in as a best practice and means of delivering a positive IT experience to the organization.  The new tools of today tell more than just what is up and what is down, but degradation of service, API calls, and the list goes on.  All good stuff.

There are a great deal of websites in our organization today.  These websites are migrating from static pages to actual web based applications.  Websites have always been that one off for most infrastructure teams, and they sure don't do much monitoring.  Is it the forgotten front?  The devices that use web sure are exploding, and there is big push from marketing and the business for a bigger, more advance web presence, so are we ready? 

There are a few great tools out there to help monitor your web environment, like Gomaz, and OpNet.  These 2 tools together can cover your entire environment and help you deliver a consistent positive experience.  One of the problems I find is that we monitor but we don't take action of the results of the monitoring.  No actionable items come out of the monitoring and that is a missed opportunity.  If you are going to go through the effort and expense of monitoring your websites - and you are getting alerts to issues, make them actionable items.  I recommend taking these alerts to Service Now and turn them into incident tickets, actionable items and get them resolved.  Using a tool like Service Now gives you exposure to the issues, trending, problem management and integration to change management.  Yes, change management for your web environment.  This is not a static environment anymore, but quickly becoming an application environment.  This environment needs standards, process, controls and some best practice. 

One last recommendation, don't let your website development firm dictate or drive your web environment, infrastructure or process(s).  They are interested in their 1 site they just developed and you paid significant money for.  You are the holder of the big picture for the organization and you need to be the owner of your environment. 

Keep it positive!

Scott Arnett
scott.arnett@charter.net

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