Most organizations use a mix of physical equipment and digital services in their technology infrastructure—everything from computing hardware, industrial sensors and building cooling systems to cloud, SaaS and virtual networking services. Managing these increasingly complex hybrid environments has become a sizable challenge. Often, infrastructure is spread over many systems and locations—public and private, physical and virtual, on-premises and remote.
To further complicate matters, different teams have traditionally managed information technology (IT), which focuses on processing, storing and transmitting data, and operational technology (OT), which focuses on physical equipment, sensors and building management (including data centers). Often, IT and OT teams have worked in separate domains within an organization, and their data and tools have been siloed. This can create problems for any company that wants a comprehensive picture of the health and capacity of their whole infrastructure.
As hybrid infrastructure evolves, there’s growing interest in integrating IT and OT to simplify management, improve decision-making and optimize operations. The digital transformation of the past few decades has resulted in a wealth of data that’s available to help companies gain visibility into their environments. Collecting and processing this data is at the heart of modern observability tools. The convergence of IT and OT offers the promise of more unified observability solutions that facilitate data-driven business operations, integrated security controls and increased connectivity across all systems. And the business benefits of unified observability are many: improved visibility can help companies streamline operations, reduce outages, improve cost efficiency and much more.
The challenge of modern infrastructure management
Imagine a global financial services company with a diverse infrastructure that includes physical and virtual technologies. On the IT side, the company has core banking software, cloud platforms, cybersecurity tools, CRM systems, servers and networking equipment. On the OT side, they have assets like ATMs, physical security devices, specialized servers, GPUs for fault detection and building management systems. These IT and OT assets are located in branches, private data centers and colocation facilities. With such a complex environment distributed around the world, the company is facing significant management complexity. They are growing and actively expanding services, but a series of outages and slowdowns has threatened to negatively impact customer trust, and their data management challenges are putting them at risk of regulatory violations.
This financial company’s multifaceted infrastructure isn’t unlike that of many global enterprises in other industries. IT and OT assets have been acquired over time, as have different monitoring tools. There’s often friction between different departments in the company and very little cross-departmental communication or data sharing. The quantities of monitoring data available can be overwhelming, and they don’t have a unified approach to using it. When there’s an outage or other technology problem, many organizations are simply reacting after the fact. Even if they’re using an established observability tool, it might not have access to all the data from their remote sites, cloud services and data centers.
It’s becoming clearer every day that infrastructure management needs a transformation. The emerging era of infrastructure management will enable more centralized data collection and monitoring to ensure that all technology systems are operating properly and have sufficient resources to handle current and future workloads. With the convergence of IT and OT, companies have an opportunity for more unified observability across all technology domains.
Why unified observability is becoming vital
On the OT side, companies typically need insight into issues like:
- Are all our remote devices (such as ATMs, specialized servers or industrial sensors) online?
- Is our data center temperature cool enough to keep servers operating optimally?
- Have physical security systems detected any issues?
- Is there adequate power supply in our data centers and branches?
Similarly, IT often needs to address questions such as:
- How is our network operating in terms of bandwidth utilization, packet loss or outages?
- Are IT systems performing well to enable good application response times and CPU usage?
- Are we fully compliant with data privacy and security regulations?
- What users are accessing IT resources?
It’s not uncommon for the two domains to influence each other. For instance, a temperature control issue in a data center could lead to a network problem. But if a company only has network performance data, it could mislead them to expect a network device issue.
As IT and OT converge, organizations are beginning to move toward unified observability solutions to help them more quickly identify and mitigate issues, or even prevent them, by synthesizing data across domains. Unified observability can deliver that “single pane of glass” technology teams dream of: one integrated dashboard to rule them all.
For the financial services company in our story, better visibility across their interconnected IT and OT infrastructure could be a game changer. A more comprehensive IT/OT monitoring solution would allow them to synthesize information from their cloud-based applications, branch offices and ATMs, virtual networking services and traditional data center infrastructure in a colocation facility.
How do we get to unified observability?
There’s a lot on the horizon in the infrastructure management space. Technology providers are innovating new ways of making data available to their customers and to third-party observability solutions through APIs and Infrastructure as Code (IaC), for example. Modern observability tools are evolving quickly, integrating AI to provide more intelligent monitoring and automation. And many asset management providers are broadening their offerings to cover both IT and OT asset data, using potential unified observability data.
At Equinix, we’re taking a multipronged approach to supporting unified observability for our customers. Plenty of businesses are already using popular observability tools, and we’re partnering with observability providers to make Equinix data available to those tools from both our data center and virtual networking solutions.
- For our colocation customers, Equinix is partnering with data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software providers and asset management providers like Sunbird, Hyperview, RiT Tech and Modius to provide a centralized view of data center assets across distributed locations.
- For our virtual networking customers, we’re providing Equinix Fabric® network performance data and audit logs in popular observability solutions like Splunk and Datadog.
In addition, organizations can get their Equinix OT and IT data in one place by, for instance, using a webhook sink to send real-time data to their third-party platform of choice.
We’re also working toward a unified way to access Equinix data center and networking data directly on our platform, for those organizations that prefer a native solution. Regardless of a customer’s approach to unified observability, Equinix will continue to provide a neutral, vendor-agnostic environment that empowers companies to choose their preferred service providers and pivot whenever they need to.
As organizations look for new ways to streamline their infrastructure management for improved visibility, operations and cost efficiency, Equinix is committed to continuous innovation to keep enhancing our services to address the evolving needs of global enterprises.
Learn more about our approach to observability and the role of high-performance data centers in a modern hybrid infrastructure.
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