May 19, 2020Leave a Comment

Data Center

Carpe Diem: What Data Center

Operators Must Do to Manage Day 2
Ops Today?
Usha Andra

Special thanks to the Cisco Data Center Networking (DCN) product

management team, Aniket Lele, John Ng, Emmeline Chou, Adam Ozkan and
David Keith for their inputs.

As Cisco is helping countries develop their digital capabilities during the on-
going crisis, enterprises are seeing unprecedented application and growth in
data within Data Centers (DC’s). IT is looking for ways to collect and analyze
vast amounts of information while planning for the needs of compute, storage
and network connectivity. This puts a heavy burden on the network operations
to ensure that everything is working effectively, efficiently and scales to the
business needs — and works right the first time — to meet their intent.
Operators also face the challenge of managing change according to intent,
with the need to have visibility into their fabric and the ability to quickly
remediate issues when troubleshooting providing for a truly Intent Based
Network (IBN).

As networks have grown more critical to every organization’s mission, the

need to understand what is going on in and across the network has become
vital to the success of network staff and IT organizations. Why is that?
Because the network condition is a prime determinant of a successful
experience for the end user — from internal worker to external partner to end
customer/consumer.

Multicloud architectures that include private and public clouds are the new
normal for most enterprises. Multicloud environments frequently encompass
multiple generations of bare metal, virtualized, and container-based platforms
and both traditional and cloud-native applications. As use of multicloud
architectures scale, and applications become more dynamic and distributed,
enterprises require comprehensive automation and analytics solutions to help
maintain performance, reduce business risk, and reduce costs.

Cloud services, machine learning, artificial intelligence, network virtualization,

autonomous infrastructure, edge computing, real-time telemetry,
programmatic interfaces, and open source — all and more are combined to
serve the complex needs of Data Center Network Management in this digital
era.

Most of the challenges currently faced by network operators are related to the
capabilities of running a network, which is called Day 2 Operations. Also, for
the record, Day 0 is design and procurement; Day 1 is installing, provisioning,
segmenting – getting it running.

Figure 1: Key challenges that global Data Center Network (DCN) network operators
face
 

In this white paper titled “Addressing the Need for Proactive Day 2 Datacenter
Network Operations”, IDC Research Vice President Brad Casemore explores
how the Cisco Network Assurance and Insights is suited to respond to these
needs with a set of capabilities for proactive Day 2 network operations.

How does Network Insights and Assurance meet

these challenges?
Network operators is no longer a black art or a guessing game – it’s a proven
science! Transforming Day-2 Operations with Cisco Data Center Network
Assurance and Insights is imminent to keeping operators’ infrastructure
running at its best, 24/7, giving them the power to predict Day 2 and beyond.
Cisco’s approach to Day 2 network operations is represented by Cisco
Network Assurance and Insights, an integrated set of tools that provides
network assurance, proactive advisories, and intelligent analytics (see Figure
2).

The Network Assurance and Insights platform extends Cisco’s Data Center
Intent Based Network (IBN) to transform the network operation model and
enables IT operations to align closely with business objectives and outcomes
as well as operational requirements across both ACI and DCNM controllers.
Figure 2: Cisco Data Center Network (DCN) Solutions: Assurance and Insights on Top
of the Stack

Here are three specific issues that the Network Assurance and Insights (A&I)
capabilities have solved:

Change management
a. Problem: When changes need to be made to a DC network, there is
generally little understanding if the change is implemented and executing as
planned.

b. Solution: With the Cisco Network Assurance Engine (NAE), the network

operator has the capability to model the changes before it is pushed to the
network. NAE can report the potential impact before the change is made. That
helps reduce the operator’s change window, making it happen as intended the
first time around.
Managing compliance roles
a. Problem: Enterprises want to segregate or segment their data and network
so the end users cannot access data that is proprietary to the institution.

b. Solution: A&I allows operators to set up rules to execute segmentation,

where in case of violation, the system flags it. The system will also alert the
operator in case of any errors during software and hardware upgrades.
Overall, A&I provides an ease of use to troubleshoot issues when
implementing changes and during migration.

Fabric visibility
a. Problem: Users and operators need accurate reporting of the connectivity
in the network

b. Solution: With A&I, the operator will not only know the connectivity status
but also the data flow between one point to another, along with latency,
reasons for packet drops, missing policies and contracts or how it is all
interconnected along with any environmental issues with the network –
providing end to end visibility.

What does this all mean? IDC VP of research, Brad Casemore, sums it all
up in the independent assessment that Cisco Network Assurance and Insights
has the following benefits of successfully addressing Day 2 operations:

 Improved customer experience

 Increased revenue
 Decreased cost
 Business continuity and compliance

He states in conclusion that “Cisco Network Assurance and Insights is

designed to help network operators achieve those benefits for their
organizations. An integrated set of intelligent tools that provide analysis,
ensure intent, and identify network performance issues, Cisco Network
Assurance and Insights gives network operators a means of enhancing Day 2
operations with deep analysis, intent assurance, and identification of network
performance issues. By automating and modernizing Day 2 operations,
network operators can align better with the strategic objectives and business
outcomes of their organizations and deliver ongoing benefits such as
enhanced customer experience, increased revenue, lower costs, and assured
business continuity and compliance.”

Learn more at:

Data Center

Intelligent Data Center Operations from

Anywhere
Bradley TerEick

The current business climate has forced all of us to adapt to new routines and
new business processes. Never have the demands for data services been
higher, nor has security for these services been more critical. These changes
have placed a significant burden on data center operators who may be
currently working from home.

If you are one of these data center operators and you are responsible for
remotely supporting computing infrastructure, you may be leveraging a VPN
connection to access data center-based tools to help you manage your
compute devices. This can be effective, but there is a more modern, secure,
and efficient way that’s also securely accessible from anywhere in the world.

Meet Cisco Intersight:

Cisco Intersight is a SaaS-based, intelligent operations platform that enables
monitoring, deployment, compliance, telemetry, and more for your data center
infrastructure. With its highly secure, device-to-service connections otherwise
known as Device Connectors, Intersight can extend its reach to review and/or
manipulate even the lowest-level components in your computing
infrastructure. For instance, Intersight can intelligently:

 Configure or reconfigure server or HyperFlex clusters in their entirety;

from the lowest level component, to installing an operating system
 Define policies and standards for consistent device configuration
 Update device firmware
 Compare server, firmware, OS, and driver versions to validate
compliance with the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL)
 Display device-specific health, alarms, and detailed hardware inventory
 Integrate with Cisco’s Technical Assistance Center (TAC) to display
contract status, streamline support case activity and analysis, and
automatically initiate failed hardware Return Material Authorizations
(RMAs)
 Analyze storage capacity and predict storage consumption
 Display inventory and metrics via customizable dashboard interfaces
and widgets
 Provision Cisco Validated Designs and Solutions, such as HyperFlex
SD-WAN
 Connect from the Intersight Portal, through a secure tunnel, to KVM
interfaces
 Orchestrate and Automate infrastructure workflows
  Integrate with 3rd party solutions such as Pure Storage and VMware
vCenter
 Reveal exactly how security vulnerabilities and advisories are affecting
specific components in your infrastructure and how you can remediate
 Integrate and provide more fidelity to your ServiceNow ITSM platform
 And more…

Intersight leverages a Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)

Model, so new functionality and capabilities are consistently being added.

If you want to learn more about how Intersight can simplify your data center
operations, please attend the following webinar in one of the two timeslots
below:

Smarter Infrastructure Management with Cisco Intersight

 Session 1 (May 19 9:00 AM Pacific)

 Session 2 (May 26 8:00 PM Pacific, May 27 1:00 PM Australia Eastern
Standard Time)

During this webinar, we will explore the motivation behind the development of
Intersight, its transformative architecture, and a demo. You’ll also here from a
customer about how they are using Intersight to improve their IT operations.

January 21, 20201 Comment

Data Center

Transforming Day 2 Operations with

Cisco Data Center Network
Assurance and Insights
Thomas Scheibe

Introducing Cisco Data Center Network Assurance and Insights to transform

Day 2 Operations.

The challenge of operating a data center has never been greater. But the
opportunities have never been larger. Today, data-driven businesses (which is
to say, most businesses) are changing rapidly to stay competitive. There are
more applications than ever, and more different classes of people and
machines using the applications. And there’s constant change in the shape of
business infrastructures, as data “centers” become less centralized thanks to
edge and cloud-based storage and compute resources.

The opportunity for us in IT is to enable these changes. When we do this well,

IT is in strategic partnership with business. Being flexible and responsive to
business means that strategic planners will find encouragement for their plans
in the technology core where we work, which makes IT leaders copilots in
business growth.

But the only way for IT to offer this level of service is to have deep
understanding of what the data center is doing, how everyone and everything
is using it, how it is responding to the demands on it, and most importantly,
how it will respond to new loads that arise due to new business processes.
Intent-based networking helps network operators get ahead, instead of playing catch-
up.

Most of these capabilities are part of running a network, what is now often
called Day 2 Operations. (For the record, Day 0 is design and procurement;
Day 1 is installing, provisioning, segmenting – getting it running.)

To make Day 2 Ops easier for our customers, we’re happy to announce today
that Cisco is expanding its Data Center Network Assurance and Insights
suite to include new Network Insights capabilities. This portfolio of software
analytics capabilities for existing Cisco data center installations — whether
they’re based on DCNM or ACI – can analyze every component of a data
center to first, assure business intent; second, guarantee reliability; and finally,
identify performance issues in a network before they happen.
These new capabilities enable people in IT operations to do their jobs more
easily, and in the process, add value to the data center and the business
itself. It is part of our drive to bring intent-based networking to our customers,
so they can spend more time thinking about what they want their installations
to do, and less time worrying about how they will do it.

The Latest Tools

To keep a network running smoothly, we are adding service reliability
functions to Network Insights. New features  will gather system-level wide
data from every Cisco switch in the fabric, detect anomalies before they
impact applications, and notify operators of these issues before they affect the
integrity of  network services. Network Insights can also provide proactive
upgrade advice for devices across the fabric.

If a problem should arise, our intelligent analytics capability will identify the
root cause, using real-time flow telemetry from devices in the fabric. This
feature monitors application patterns, latency data, packet drops, and other
metrics to allow for fast correlation between infrastructure status and actual
network traffic.

We are adding more assurance capabilities as well. The new change

verification feature allows operators to understand the impacts of changes by
modeling them before they are implemented in the fabric.

With all these new capabilities, we will provide a common solution, one that
works across ACI and NX-OS, as we  transform Day 2 Operations from
reactive to proactive.
Intelligent Analytics pinpoints policy drop events and correlates to flow and tenant
context.

Brad Casemore, IDC Research vice president, understands the value of this
mission. He says,

“Driven by the imperative of digital transformation, enterprise IT is under

unprecedented pressure to align with strategic business objectives and
rapidly deliver business outcomes. As a result, network operations must be
capable of using automation to deliver services faster, provide real-time
intelligence to increase operational agility, and to reduce the time required
to troubleshoot and remediate issues and prevent unplanned outages. Cisco
Network Assurance and Insights addresses this need by predicting the
impact of changes, providing in-depth fabric visibility  through comprehensive
telemetry and data correlation to help operations teams remediate issues
quickly and deliver the business transformation required to stay ahead of
competitors.”
We can’t wait for you to get your hands on our new suite of tools. Learn more
on our new feature site: Cisco Network Insights for Data Center. And if you
will be at Cisco Live Barcelona on January 29, 2020, join me at my Innovation
Talk, Digital Transformation: Application Deployment, Infrastructure
Automation, and Assurance.

Learn more about Data Center Network Assurance and Insights here.

November 26, 2019Leave a Comment

Data Center

AlgoSec Security Management

Solution available on Cisco Global
Price List
Ranga Rao

Today marks an important milestone for Cisco’s Data Center offerings to our
customers with the unveiling of a new ACI technology ecosystem partner
solution. We are pleased to announce availability of “AlgoSec Security
Management Solution” on Cisco’s Global Price List. Read Press Release from
AlgoSec here for details.

“AlgoSec Security Management solution (ASMS)” has delivered tremendous

value to our joint customers across the world, with its ability to extend ACI’s
policy-driven automation to security devices in the fabric, helping them
automate policy enforcement for security devices in the fabric and ensure
continuous compliance across multicloud ACI environments. To make it easier
for our customers to procure that solution, we onboarded AlgoSec to Cisco
Global Price List through Cisco DevNet Solutions Plus Program. Now Cisco’s
direct and channel sales network can offer AlgoSec’s solution together with
Cisco networking products as a single package. For details on AlgoSec
solution orderability, check Cisco commerce.

What makes this solution compelling for you as a Cisco customer or a

partner? Rapidly changing business needs and application connectivity
requirements in modern data centers pose big challenges to ensuring
compliance and security. With thousands of firewall rules across many
different security devices, frequent changes, limited visibility and lack of
trained security personnel , managing security policies manually is now
impossible. This is where ASMS (AlgoSec Security Management Solution)
comes in.

ASMS automates and orchestrates network security policy management,

maps and migrates application connectivity, and proactively analyzes
application risks –  across any cloud and on-premise networks.

AlgoSec integrates with Cisco ACI to extend ACI’s Application centric policy-
based automation to AlgoSec managed security devices across their data
center, on its edges and in the cloud. AlgoSec Security Management Solution
for ACI enables customers to ensure continuous compliance and automate
the provisioning of security policies not just across the ACI fabric but also
across multi-vendor security devices connected to ACI fabric, helping them
build secure data centers. The solution is based on Cisco APIC and ASMS
integration to delivers a powerful multi-tenant, policy-driven, application-
centric model for network security. Read Solution brief for details.

The AlgoSec Security Management Solution comprises three key components

– AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer, AlgoSec Fireflow, and AlgoSec Application
Connectivity Management.
 

AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer (AFA) – Network Security Policy Analysis, auditing

and compliance

AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer delivers visibility and analysis of complex network

security policies across Cisco ACI, firewalls attached to ACI fabric and other
upstream security devices. The solution automates and simplifies security
operations including troubleshooting, auditing policy cleanup, risk and
compliance analysis and audit preparations.

AlgoSec FireFlow (AFF) – Security Policy Change Automation

AlgoSec FireFlow helps you process security policy changes in a fraction of

the time, so you can respond to business requirements with the agility they
demand. FireFlow automates the entire security policy change process —
from design and submission to proactive risk analysis, implementation,
validation and auditing with the support for automated policy enforcement on
Cisco ACI and multi-vendor security devices, including Cisco ASA & FTD,
Check Point Software, Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks.

AlgoSec Application Connectivity Management: AlgoSec AppViz &

AppChange

The AppViz (Application Visibility Add-On) add-on accelerates identification

and mapping of all the network attributes and rules that support business-
critical applications – making it easier for organizations to make changes to
their applications across any on-premise and cloud platform, and to
troubleshoot network and change management issues across the entire
enterprise environment.

AlgoSec’s AppChange (Application Lifecycle Change Management Add-

On) automatically translates and implements network security policy changes
on all relevant devices across the entire network to reflect specific connectivity
requirement for applications. This saves time for IT and security teams and
eliminates manual errors and misconfigurations. AppChange addresses the
critical issues of human error and configuration mistakes that are the biggest
causes of network and application outages.

These components are offered as independent software licenses and bundles

on Cisco’s Global Price List.

In summary, the AlgoSec Security Management Solution integrates with and

complements Cisco ACI Anywhere, providing consistent security policy
management and visibility across data centers and clouds

October 17, 2019Leave a Comment

Data Center

Introducing the Cisco Intersight

Mobile App for Data Center Visibility
on the Go
Bradley TerEick

With the tremendous customer adoption of Cisco Intersight, Cisco has now
extended the reach of its Management-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform with the
introduction of the Cisco Intersight Mobile App. The Intersight Mobile App
provides a new intuitive view of Intersight managed systems, allowing users to
keep an eye on what’s going on in their data center no matter where they are
or what device they use.

The Intersight Mobile App is available today for iOS and Android.

 
The new app provides on-the-go Health and Inventory detail for your
Intersight-managed UCS and Hyperflex environment, so if a managed
system’s health degrades to a point where an alarm is generated, the app will
display relevant alarm detail. In addition, a comprehensive status of any
Intersight-driven request can be monitored via the “Requests” dashboard.
Below we’re going to walk you through a series of screenshots with a few
examples in the new app, so you see first-hand how easy it is to monitor your
data center while you’re not in the office.

How does it work?

The Intersight OpenAPI provides a REST-based,

programmatic interface for accessing the Intersight Management Information
Model that is representative of your compute environment. The App solicits
this model through the API and returns a rich set of status-related details for
UCS Servers, HyperFlex Clusters, and Fabric Interconnects. These details
are then displayed in an easy to understand format within the App.

A quick peek at the appropriate dashboard can reveal Server, HyperFlex

Cluster, or Fabric Interconnect views for your environment. These dashboards
provide high-level roll-ups showing health, inventory, model, and alarm
summaries.

 
 

How are my servers doing?

This dashboard is showing that there are 54 healthy systems on the Server
Dashboard, with one showing up as critical. To investigate, simply select the
red “Critical” hot link. Seeing that it’s C220, you can then select that server.
In this scenario, the app is showing an alarm indicating a problem with fan 1 in
server 1. The user can then take this information, turn on the locator from the
app and have one of the operators go and assess the situation.

HyperFlex Storage Capacity on the Go

Taking a closer look at the HyperFlex Dashboard and the HyperFlex “Top 5
Storage Utilization” summary on the bottom of the screen, it appears HX-SJC-
01 has a capacity warning. Digging deeper into the HyperFlex Cluster Details
for HX-SJC-01, it appears 61.8% of 110.6 TB is in use. This information tells
the app user that they’ll need to keep an eye on the situation.
 The Intersight App can also be used to
monitor the progress of requests initiated through Intersight. For instance, if
someone kicked off an OS installation on one of their C240 servers the
previous day, they can see if – and how – that finished up. In the screenshot
below it appears that the task is complete, and only took 38 minutes.

 
 Here is a complete list of my current alarms.  There are
several issues being flagged with varying levels of severity.  The alarms
provide a level of visibility that enables IT teams to prioritize and be proactive
in managing their infrastructure

This is just the beginning for Intersight’s Mobile App. With this introductory
version of the mobile app, users get:

 On-the-go health and inventory detail

 HyperFlex capacity detail
 Status and monitoring of Intersight-driven requests
In our next post, we’ll discuss the recently released Intelligent Advisories with
Cisco Intersight. The Advisories will help you identify how Critical
Vulnerabilities, PSIRTs, and Field Notices may be affecting your managed
devices. These advisory capabilities and other features will be coming to the
mobile app soon.

Ready to Get Started?

Take the Intersight Mobile App with you and see for yourself how easy it is to
keep tabs on your data center infrastructure from anywhere. Download the
app today.

Tier 3 Data Centers

Published on March 17, 2020,
by Mike Schmitt
Share:

Understanding Tier 3 Data Centers and Efficient

Management
Data centers hold an increasingly influential role in our landscape of modernity. From
data center infrastructure management (DCIM) to hybrid digital infrastructure
management (HDIM) with high-performance computing workloads, IT companies have
much to consider and manage.

One way this management has begun to be systematized and made accessible across
companies is through tiers.

How can companies begin to understand this tiering system and the different types of
data centers? Having done this, how can companies take steps to begin to manage
data centers more efficiently?

What is the Tier System?

Simply put, the tier system for data centers is a means of describing the different kinds
of data center infrastructures. The tiers can also be described as levels. Each tier, itself,
then describes specifics about how the various types of data centers function. This has
implications for uptime, downtime, and the effects (or lack thereof) of disruptions,
including outages and planned or unplanned maintenance.

What are the Tiers?

Data centers are assigned a tier rating based on a variety of factors. These include, but
are not limited to, infrastructure design, operational sustainability, and various
capacities. The now-common system was originally developed by The Uptime Institute
in the 1990s and describes different IT requirements per tier rating.

Tier 1 and Tier 2

Tier 1 centers have basic features of a data center, including dedicated IT space and
means of maintaining operations during disruptions. Tier 2 centers enhance these
features by also including redundancy capacity components such as UPS modules.

Tier 3
However, Tier 3 and Tier 4 classifications are becoming increasingly necessary
although they technically are efficient beyond many current IT requirements. Compared
to Tiers 1 and 2, Tier 3 systems greatly decrease data centers’ downtime. They also
involve an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) as a N+1. This means that the centers
maintain the typical system while having a back up option when necessary. Such
redundant delivery paths allow for maintenance, upgrades, and changes to be affected
with minimal interruption to power and cooling.

Even though Tier 3 systems are still somewhat fault-susceptible, they are a substantial
improvement from Tier 1 and Tier 2 options. Centers are opting to implement such
functionality in light of the high price incurred for disruption if their centers are not
optimized.

Efficient Management
Mahalingam Ramasamy, the managing director of 4T technology consulting, accredited
tier designer (ATD) from The Uptime Institute, describes key features of Tier 3 classified
data center systems that can help increase the efficiency of data center management.
Such tips include:

 Note where the electricity is derived from. The Uptime Institute purports that garnering
electricity from only utility services is unstable. Automatic transfer switches (ATS)—at
least two of which companies must maintain for Tier 3 classification—can switch to the
backup generation with at least 12 hours of reserve fuel supply as a more sustainable
option.
 Make sure each UPS is connected to a single distribution box. This means only one
power distribution circuit will go down in instances of disruptions, including failure or
maintenance. Servers must each have two power distribution boxes as well as each
server in the racks having dual power supply features.
Although data center infrastructure management can pose various challenges, the Tier
system can increase efficiency through providing guidelines for improvement and
sustainable ways to enhance IT functionality.

Four Ways to Add Analytics Value to Your

Business
Michael Singer
DIRECTOR, PRODUCT MARKETING, ORACLE ANALYTICS

All data tells a story. The challenge is to find that story by analyzing business data in
dozens of ways, using spreadsheets, applications, desktop tools, long-standing data
warehouses, and business intelligence software. That means you are probably managing
a variety of different dimensions—specific requirements for accessing various data
sources, complexities around understanding visualizations, and of course, the associated
costs. At the same time, everyone wants more innovation faster—all without sacrificing
correct and consistent results.
Companies just like yours seek solutions that offer easy access to any data, enabling you
to make the best use of your entire data story, no matter where it is. What’s even more
important is having a variety of options for intelligent analysis that isn't overwhelming to
deploy and manage. The result creates an an effective way to engage more people in
analysis and extend your organization's expertise. After all, you can have all the bells and
whistles a robust platform should offer—but if only a select few can figure out how to
use them, what are you really gaining?
So, the question you face is how find and tell that story. How will you get the flexibility
you need together with the structure to drive accuracy, and the speed to disrupt your
competitors? Here are four values that can apply to your business analytics strategy.
Subscribe to the Oracle Analytics Advantage blog  and get the latest posts sent to your
inbox
Visualize Your Business
Every company has a story to tell with its data. There are customer transactions,
marketing metrics, collaboration with partners and suppliers, innovations in business
processes, and the enablement of growth and personnel efficiencies. And while the data
is abundant, useful insights are sometimes difficult to develop.

Data visualization software makes these complex ideas engaging, meaningful, and easy
to understand. With just a few clicks, business managers can add, analyze, and share
new insights. Savvy executives use this technology to improve their strategies with facts
and get action from their ideas. The important thing is that data visualization can help
us see information differently—and by doing so, we make better decisions in ways that
spreadsheets or traditional static business intelligence cannot deliver.
Make 'What-If' Simple
One of the benefits of modern business analytics software is that more people can gain
a deeper understanding of the problems they are trying to solve without having to be
data scientists.
Imagine if workers at a manufacturing plant could know when and why a machine
would fail before it happened. How much would that impact production? Data modeling
and predictive analytics programs can help answer these types of questions. Previously,
this type of insight could only be delivered by data scientists working with sophisticated
algorithms. Now, business managers with no data science experience can easily look at
data, ask "what if" questions, identify hidden relationships, and convey these insights to
the rest of the business.

Simplifying these forecasting and modeling scenarios enables business users to quickly
model complex business questions. Organizations can then define a dimensional view of
their business—and provide business users with new levels of self-service to access,
navigate, and gain actionable insight into critical business issues. All of this is enabled
through cloud-based analytics platforms.
Choose Flexibility
Analytics implementations have matured in uneven ways, making it clear that there's no
single formula for success, especially with hybrid-cloud and on-premises deployments.
In some cases, a turnkey cloud service is the right answer; in other cases, you may need
a cloud environment where you can turn all the knobs and cranks like you did on-
premises. Either allows you to lift and shift back and forth between on-premises and the
cloud. The result is a sense of balance, with organizations working smarter—not harder
—to bring these elements together.

The growing tension between governance, risk, and compliance is also relaxed by this
flexibility to choose. Financial, operational, and regulatory policies and mandates
overwhelm your ability to manage the associated risks. Challenges are compounded by
a lack of enterprise-wide visibility. What could go wrong? Have you ever asked yourself
what it would take to spend less time worrying about risks so you could focus on
pursuing growth opportunities?

Add Augmented Analytics, AI, and ML

What if businesses gained the power to identify your needs and fulfill them long before
you even thought of them?

Sure, websites already track our browsing patterns and make suggestions, but what
we're talking about here is something much deeper. Business intelligence is evolving
into augmented analytics.

Augmented analytics, along with the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine
learning (ML), address how we interact with information and transform how we work
and live. For example, businesses are preventing and detecting credit card fraud,
automating supply chains through checks and balances, optimizing supply chain finance
based on market swings, and boosting data center efficiency. With the help of artificial
intelligence and machine learning, these abilities are now at the intersection of people
judgment and machine automation, and augmented analytics makes them possible.
What could be possible in your organization if insights came to you when you needed
them most? What might happen if half the content for your next operations review were
generated by machines? How prepared would you be for your next meeting if you were
notified of changes based on your location?

Augmented analytics applications are a new category of continuously adapting, self-

learning applications powered by enterprise data from a variety of data sources,
including transactional business apps (such as customer experience, enterprise resource
planning, supply chain management, and human resources). These are solutions that
operate without human bias and deliver a very high degree of confidence—on a very
large scale.

The Value of Data-Driven Innovation

Take a moment to think about all the data generated during a single business day. New
customer profiles. Sales logs. Marketing touches. Payroll allotments. Service records.
Inventory rolls. No doubt that in a single 24-hour period, a business retains specific
details of a massive number of transactions. But what does it all mean?

Simpler big data discovery tools will let business analysts shop for datasets in enterprise
Hadoop clusters, reshape them into new mashup combinations, and even analyze them
with exploratory machine-learning techniques. Extending this kind of exploration to a
broader audience will improve self-service access to large data repositories and provide
richer hypotheses and experiments that drive the next level of innovation.

Many successful companies have already adopted a data-driven approach to innovation.

They connect their data, automate their processes, understand the business drivers,
align corporate finance planning with operations planning, and build their
team's analytics expertise.
To learn how you can benefit from Oracle Analytics, visit Oracle.com/analytics, and
follow us on Twitter @OracleAnalytics.