EITM at CA

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A few years ago, CA had not centrally managed system of risk controls, no common view of governance for IT processes, and compliance costs were high. Clearly, this was not sustainable.

As a business, CA has some 2,755 controls that need monitoring on a daily basis. This places considerable demands on an IT department that is already supporting 27,000 PCs, 1,300 servers and four mainframes. Moreover, as CA rolls SAP out across its global operations, it also has to maintain two core business systems, as well as plan new projects that can help CA grow its main business.

"It is easy to upgrade a mainframe or add more storage. There is not a day that goes by when someone says that their application isn't running fast enough, or they are having a problem with their BlackBerry," says Dave Hansen, who has been CIO at CA for just over six months. "But aligning IT investment with business goals is the real challenge."

Day-to-day operational issues take up more of Hansen's time than he would like. But as "CA's best reference customer" he also has more incentive than most to keep a tight reign on IT management and governance, given the importance of these tools in CA's product line up.

"Managing risk and compliance is one of the largest areas CIOs are involved in, but often the CIO doesn't have the tools," explains Hansen. "And the CFO will be asking for this to be done, with a lower budget every year."

Repositioning the company

In the last 18 months, CA has positioned itself in the market as one of the leading proponents of enterprise IT management (EITM). So it comes as no surprise that EITM is at the heart of how Hansen runs his department. "EITM is about governance, management and security," he says. "We have access to 16 solutions that are helping to match IT initiatives back to the business."

Key tools for CA's internal IT department include Clarity for risk and control management as well as IT project management, as well as Siteminder for identity and access management and Service Desk for incident management.

Today, CA runs over 600 business applications. As the company's IT systems have become more sophisticated, and complex, the number of infrastructure events has risen to over 1.8m "infrastructure events" each day: way more than an IT staff of 600 people could handle. Automation brings this number down to 3000 correlated critical events.

Of these, around 500 are solved automatically within five minutes; a further 1500 are escalated to support staff. Even where the automated systems can fix a fault, however, it is logged in the Service Desk system so that the IT department can work on ways to prevent failures in the future.

"Day-to-day IT management is something I simply have to do well," says Hansen. "Having tools to automate that is critical, as is having ITIL for standard processes around how we do things."

Automating key processes

Hansen sees automation as critical to reducing the percentage of IT time spent on operations and for increasing the resources available for innovation, even if that means increasing IT spending in the short term.

"There is a value to spending money on investing in operations, in order to take costs out," he explains. "When it comes to non-discretionary, operational expenditure versus discretionary expenditure, we recognise that we need to invest more in our systems. Our budget is larger this year than last year."

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