By integrating the monitoring platform with other management solutions, the organisation creates a holistic business management tool.

Effective management of IT operations remains a critical challenge for organisations. Not only are hybrid IT operations more complex than ever before, with applications and infrastructure spread across on-premises, hosted and public clouds, but the pressure to drive down cost is ever-present.

Gift Mkhonza, business development manager for advanced technologies at Axiz, explains that managing costs remains a key priority for IT leadership. Not only are the financial risks posed by IT downtime growing all the time, as businesses become increasingly dependent on technology for day-to-day operations, but the risks are not always proportional to the cost or scale of the technology.

“Today, the ability to understand the risk posed by any application, Web site, database, infrastructure and network outage is linked to the ability of the company to monitor their infrastructure,” Mkhonza says. “However, research has shown 25% of large enterprises have eight or more network performance monitoring tools currently installed, with some supporting as many as 25. And that’s just the network.”

Relying on multiple tools means a company won’t likely have an accurate view of its environment and will struggle to manage it proactively.

“Our partnership with SolarWinds, a leader in infrastructure management, enables our partners to provide their customers with a solution to this proliferation of management tools,” he says. “By consolidating the number of non-integrated IT monitoring, analysis and management solutions, companies can reduce the direct and recurring costs of licences, subscriptions and renewals. Our partners also benefit from a reduction in the number of vendor contracts that need to be negotiated and managed. In addition, organisations can gain integrated visibility into the performance and availability of their entire hybrid IT environment, which helps reduce operational, financial and reputational risks and impacts.”

The impact of deploying the SolarWinds solution is easily noticeable. According to a SolarWinds survey conducted in 2020 with over 350 customers, the SolarWinds network performance monitoring solution can on average save up to 11.5 hours of manual tasks per week. This allows stretched IT teams to focus on achieving strategic business goals rather than just troubleshooting.

Building skills to drive value

Mkhonza adds that Axiz has invested heavily in upskilling its internal staff, to ensure they are able to support partners across the board. “We’re focused on providing support to our partners, and to achieve this we offer professional services through our SolarWinds-trained pre-sales engineers. Our partners also have access to the SolarWinds Academy, allowing them to upskill their teams to deliver greater value to their customers.”

Once SolarWinds is deployed in an organisation, it provides full visibility of the entire IT environment. This allows the a company to identify and resolve problems faster, as well as understand the impact of each system on the business, letting companies prioritise issues with the greatest business impact.

Integrating the monitoring platform with other management solutions creates a holistic business management tool, focusing the attention of the team on what areas can deliver the greatest business value. This, in turn, informs the larger business and IT strategy, enabling companies to make the right investments and helping ensure these deliver maximum business value.