SKYTAP

IT Operations Solution

The Challenge

Todays IT environments are being upgraded, patched and maintained with software updates more frequently than ever before. IT operations is tasked with ensuring changes are implemented successfully without affecting production uptime and performance as well as supporting IT lab environments for internal groups such as application development, test and enterprise training.

However, most IT operations organizations lack a flexible virtualization platform to quickly and cost effectively prototype changes and deliver self-service virtual infrastructure to different internal groups. Updates are frequently rolled into production without adequate testing and IT ops spends a disproportionate amount of time provisioning IT labs instead of focusing on production uptime.

The Skytap Solution

Skytap gives IT operations teams immediate access to a virtual lab for testing production changes, patches, application performance or scheduled upgrades. Skytap offers industry standard virtual infrastructure, a bidirectional VPN gateway, public IPs, and an API, so you can treat the virtual lab as an extension of your own IT environment.

Skytap’s self-service application for managing IT labs enables multi-tiered server enviroments to be configured in minutes. In addition, using the virtual networking features, pre-production environments can be created to simulate real production scenarios. IT ops can provide and control access to different internal groups, enabling users to provision environments themselves using Skytap's self-service virtual lab application.

Skytap is ideal for an ITIL-based change management process to minimize the number and impact of change related incidents upon a service. Once a change has been approved, the updates can be safely tested in a Skytap pre-production environment before being applied to production.

Skytap can be used for a broad range of IT operations testing scenarios, including:
- Application patching and upgrades
- Change impact analysis
- Issue evaluation and resolution
- Performance testing
- IT prototyping