By Gary Morris, Principal Consultant

Remote Infrastructure Management (RIM) seems to be on the lips of many CIO’s as a new concept and a new route to business improvement. However, there’s no industry standard definition for RIM and as with many similar terms, suffers from meaning all things to all people.

The reality is that it is not new to have someone in one location doing something to a server in a data center (DC) situated elsewhere.  Today, this process is more evident as there is a greater maturity in delivery and typically a much greater distance between the people and infrastructure.

DC’s today are very expensive warehouses with big plumbing and no people. There’s a very limited need for physical touch points as demonstrated in the following analogy about a man and his dog – the dog is there to keep the man away from the machines, and the man is there to feed the dog.

RIM has been used for mainframes for many years but has also become more attractive for non-mainframe infrastructure including ‘end user’ in recent times.  This is thanks to advances in telecoms connectivity (bandwidth, quality and lower cost), increased automation, virtualization of environments and development of more sophisticated proactive enterprise management tools. Equally, as technology has developed and increased in sophistication and capability, so has what can be done remotely.

So, to separate the truth from the myths:

• RIM does not mean offshoring. RIM is ‘what it says on the tin’ – it’s infrastructure in one place, and people carrying out the service and operational management in another. That could be next door, 10 miles away or 10,000 miles away. Albeit RIM’s popularity has increased due to the ‘remote’, the fact it can be done anywhere, which can mean wage arbitrage savings, and also savings through activity consolidation benefiting from operational economies of scale – one team managing multiple infrastructure instances.

• RIM does not mean outsourcing. There are multiple ways of sourcing RIM, it can be delivered internally or externally, and in one or multiple locations.  Many organisations already have internal IT teams in one location managing infrastructure in another, equally, going further, some have set up their own captive organizations in offshore locations to do the same thing while benefiting from wage arbitrage.  Increasingly though, to avoid investment and to benefit quickly from reduced operating costs, many organizations have considered or indeed chosen to outsource to a vendor that has then provided it from an offshore location.

• RIM does not mean asset transfer. Assets can equally stay or transfer to the provider of RIM – be it in the DC itself or the technology within it.  As a minimum, what does need to take place in RIM, is a level of operational control over the technology within the environment.

So now to the truth – to why the definition of RIM has evolved. RIM has become an industry-promoted label. RIM is to a certain extent, an industry marketing label used to focus minds on this element of service delivery and the benefits it can deliver. It has particularly been adopted by Indian service providers, as it best describes what they are strong at providing to clients. As they lack local DC capability, the term RIM properly reflects what they can offer in the infrastructure space – people offshore remotely managing onshore infrastructure cheaply and efficiently. In terms of the scale of provision, then many legacy providers have arguably far more RIM and it is engrained in their global operating models.

However we define RIM and in whatever form it is considered, it is nonetheless an important tool for delivering more value and reducing costs in the IT environment – and should be part of a well considered IT strategy and architecture.

Filed under: Information Technology (IT), Process Transformation by EquaTerra