News
Professional PA Management (ITIL for PA / Smart PA Management)
- 5 July 2016
he application of IT technology in PA is rapidly gaining popularity, for instance Ethernet networks with VLAN, Ethernet for Remote I/O, Virtual Machines, Cloud, Microsoft as Operating System for SCADA, etc. We are increasingly interconnecting systems that are often situated in different locations, thereby complicating their management. In addition, the systems are installed, operated and maintained by multiple parties. Management organizations are often confronted with the challenge of how to efficiently keep track of software and hardware updates and upgrades, and how they can guarantee the availability of the various systems.
ICT Group has found that both the technical IT aspects and the management tools come in very useful in PA. The IT world has been applying a standard for configuring the management of IT resources (hardware and software) for years. This standard is known as ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library). Experience has shown that the ITIL standard is fully compatible with PA environments.
Traditional PA management mainly focuses on resolving disruptions, which, in ITIL terms, corresponds to incident management. However, if you want to take PA management to a higher level, management activities need to focus on preventing disruptions, i.e. problem management according to ITIL. This will result in increased availability of the systems, and forces one to focus on optimizing the system. In short, ITIL works seamlessly with various optimization programs.
A number of questions that can be asked from the perspective of ITIL include:
- Do I have a list of all PA components, and do I know the lifecycle of each of these components?
- How Cyber Secure is my system, and do I know who has access to which part of the system?
- How much room for expansion do I have within my current system?
The team of ICT Group has developed an ITIL scan that allows users to check the status of an organization’s PA management relatively quickly. The scan clearly shows areas that require improvement and allows us to make those improvements together with your organization. These improvements will increase the availability of your systems by means of proactive management.
