Recently I published a business service management (BSM) case study on AMERICAN SYSTEMS. If you're interested in BSM, I highly recommend reading through this report. Although there are many known business alignment success stories, AMERICAN SYSTEMS takes business alignment a step further by aligning IT elements in a way that truly supports its business goals. AMERICAN SYSTEMS sought to improve the delivery and quality of its services to the business, something they were able to accomplish by introducing ITIL and COBIT standards and deploying integrated data center management software. In all, they were able to gain situational awareness, preempt and respond to issues more efficiently, and better protect information assets.

I've outlined a few key highlights from this report below:

First off, AMERICAN SYSTEMS is a government IT innovator that provides engineering, technical, and managed services to government customers. In order to meet the needs of their clients' constant demand for new and better services, they decided to shift from a reactive to a proactive way of managing and operating.

When they set out to make changes they outlined several goals:

• Improve security information management capabilities.
• Centralize security event correlation capabilities.
• Adopt best practice processes.
• Implement business service instrumentation.

AMERICAN SYSTEMS decided to elect a team leader that would be responsible for taking the network operations and security team requirements and determine an approach that would advance general security management and overall network event correlation/management. The team selected AccelOps as its data center management solution provider since it met its criteria and had an integrated ability to monitor performance metrics, service availability, application response, changes, and security across networks devices, systems, applications, storage, virtual environments, and identity. This tool, coupled with the implementation of ITIL and an event cross-correlation tool and other supporting best practices, helped AMERICAN SYSTEMS transform their IT department and business.

Through this process, AMERICAN SYSTEMS was able to shift the corporate culture by changing from an application-siloed, reactive environment to a service-oriented, proactive environment that benefited their team and business. For the full story, read the full report!