FAQ

The best way to explain the IT Blueprint is to describe an Architectural Blueprint. When a building Architect designs a new house there is a package of drawings which describe how to construct that house. Each drawing has a very specific audience in mind. There is a set of framing drawings for the framers, electrical drawings for the electricians, plumbing drawings for the plumbers, etc… The Blueprints ensure that everyone involved in building the house understands exactly what needs to be done. Blueprints nearly eliminate confusion, maximize efficiency and minimize risk. The same concept holds true with IT Architecture. Building out an IT infrastructure which will support an application or workload is just like building a house in that there are multiple groups which are responsible for the different components coming together to work in harmony. Server, network, storage, application, and management teams all need a different view that is tailored to their tasks.

Here are Adaptivity our Blueprints define and describe current-state business and infrastructure environments in the context of key performance indicators (KPIs), demand characteristics, workload profiles, application dependencies and relationships and the associated infrastructure environments in comprehensive yet simplistic visualizations. Our Blueprints visualize complex data in simple, intuitive views to provide an IT decision framework for executing complex IT transformation initiatives.

In today’s IT organizations a tremendous amount of time is wasted because each team is left to figure out what needs to be implemented based upon a vague description provided by a central management organization. This creates confusion, waste and risk. Avoid all of those problems by planning and designing your next application environment using Blueprint4Cloud. Contact us today to learn more or click here to jump to the Blueprint4Cloud product page.

Adaptivity provides many different blueprints that visualize business and IT information that identify and describe business to IT alignment, how your applications support your business, how your applications are deployed within your infrastructure and various views on how your applications and systems communicate with each other.

Business context blueprints visualize how your business is structured, what Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) drive your business, how your applications are aligned to your business and how those applications are implemented, among other things.

IT related blueprints provide an application-centric context providing a view of your current-state that visualize application relationships and dependencies and detail infrastructure deployments, and a host of communication linkages, to name a few.

Provided below is a sampling of our standard blueprint types:

Business context blueprints

• Business Value Chain decomposition of business functions and activities (how your business operates)
• Application portfolio alignment and workload map (how your applications align to and support your business)
• Application distribution across business functions and activities (illustrates how your portfolio is positioned across your business revealing opportunities to rationalize)
• Application demographics and implementation attributes (how your applications are built, deployed and perform)
• Applications by lifecycle (the state your applications are in such as end of life, supported, new, etc.)
• Etc…

IT context blueprints

• Application infrastructure deployment view (how your applications are physically deployed)
• Application host relationship and dependency view (how your applications communicate with and depend on each other)
• Application to application connectivity view (specific application to application communications regardless of what server they reside on)
• Logical application deployment view (this is a typical logical application architecture deployment view)
• Observed communication view (the communication links captured during discovery)
• Software summary view (what software is installed on which servers)
• Business and infrastructure interactions view (these are the service relationships rendered as captured by the discovery tools)
• Recommended move groups summary (what applications and servers are candidates for moving as a group with minimal risk)
• Etc…

Design related blueprints

• Cloud fit score (pertains to cloud candidate analysis)
• Proposed solution set (bill of materials)
• Solution deployment topology (deployment pattern)
• Demand-driven execution management guide (a guide on how to manage your environment)
• User input summary (a summary of your answers to the analysis questions)
• Etc…

Customized blueprinting is also available to meet our customer’s unique project requirements.

Our blueprints can be use in various ways for a number of different projects such as aligning business requirements with IT capability, implementing and augmenting Enterprise Architecture initiatives, identifying application portfolio rationalization opportunities, identifying which applications can move to the cloud, determining move groups for data center migrations, building out/validating your CMDB CIs, evaluating deployments and architecture against DR/BCM and HA requirements, and many more. Below is a partial list of use cases where our customers have leveraged our blueprints:

• Business to IT Alignment – Enterprise Architecture context (supporting Business Reference Architecture development)
• Assessing risk and impacts to the business by aligning business processes with applications and their supporting infrastructure
• Validating application deployment patterns (physical installation) with defined DR/BMC and HA requirements
• Data Center optimization/consolidation/migration (virtualization, utility deployment, rationalization)
• Application platform transformation
• Application portfolio rationalization and deployment strategies (deployment architecture optimization, shared services, HA, DR, BCM, others)
• Cloud candidacy and deployment model decisions
• IT cost containment and optimization
• IT Service modeling (ITSM and Service Catalogs)
• Reverse-engineering application deployments
• Updating outdated documentation

Cloud computing has opened up a new world of possibilities for running your applications. While it is great to have the ability to process your workloads without having to invest in your own infrastructure there are many potential pitfalls. Latency, privacy, risk, and responsiveness are just a few of the considerations you need to explore before dropping an application into the cloud. Our experts have been building and on-boarding applications to the cloud since the days before it was even called a cloud. Our software is able to algorithmically determine which of your applications are a good fit for cloud computing, what type of cloud environment is most suitable to run your workload, and how big the environment should be based upon historical and expected utilization. Don’t make the wrong decisions about your applications cloud suitability, use Adaptivity’s Blueprint4Cloud and be sure you made the right choice. Contact us today to learn more or click here to visit the Blueprint4Cloud product page.

After deciding that your application is a good candidate for cloud computing the next daunting task is to determine which type of cloud is most suitable for your workloads. Can you take advantage of a public cloud? Is there a business requirement that forces you to use an internal private cloud? Is there an opportunity to leverage a hybrid model where certain workloads stay in your private cloud but other workloads are processed out in a public cloud? Do you know all of the factors that need to go into making the right decision? The Blueprint4Cloud software walks you through this process in a simple but thorough workflow. After you have answered a series of question which describe your business and technical requirements our software is able to algorithmically determine what type of cloud environment is most suitable to run your workload. Don’t make the wrong decisions about your applications cloud suitability, use Adaptivity’s Cloud Accelerator and be sure you made the right choice. Contact us today to learn more or click here to visit the Blueprint4Cloud product page.

Knowing which applications to move to the cloud and what type of cloud environment to use is only part of the equation for a successful cloud migration. Knowing the proper starting point for component sizing will help realize the cost benefits you are looking for from your cloud implementation. Size you cloud environment too small and your business could suffer due to poor responsiveness. Size your environment too big and you’re paying for resources you don’t need. Elasticity is a key tenet of cloud computing but you still need to find the proper starting point. Our software is able to algorithmically determine how big the environment should be based upon historical and/or expected utilization. Get your cloud deployment off to the right start using Adaptivity’s Blueprint4Cloud. Contact us today to learn more or click here to visit the Blueprint4Cloud product page.

The Business Value Chain (BVC) is a method of decomposing your business into logical groupings containing business functions and business activities. This is a key concept for proper IT planning and design so keep reading… Traditional IT planning and design utilizes the concept of business requirements but there is rarely if ever a systematic method of defining the business requirements and mapping them to technology components. Adaptivity has developed an extensible, repeatable, scalable methodology of unifying business drivers with technology supply giving unprecedented levels of clarity and accuracy to IT planning and design. You’ll be amazed at what you uncover about your existing application portfolio and how easily all new designs account for business drivers. Blueprint4Cloud will take your IT planning and design to the next level. Contact us today to learn more or click here to jump to the Blueprint4Cloud product page.

Would you build a house without a set of blueprints? Of course not! What if your set of house blueprints was missing the electrical system sheets? What if your house blueprints were only a set of framing sheets? Engineering and implementing components of a new design during the building phase is time consuming, wasteful, expensive and risky. The problem is that IT implementations are almost always based upon partial information and documentation. It’s no wonder most of the IT budget is assigned to dealing with problems during and after implementation of new systems and services. If you spend a little more time and effort during the planning phase you end up with a better design. If your design is automatically rendered into all the necessary blueprint sheets required for implementation you are doing even better. Blueprint4Cloud’s planning and design tools give you all of these capabilities and more. Contact us today to learn more or click here to jump to the Blueprint4Cloud product page.

Adaptivity’s Blueprint4Cloud makes it easy to define your business using the concept of the Business Value Chain (BVC). The BVC enables mapping of new or existing applications to the business activities they directly support. Each business activity has a set of associated business and technology requirements which directly link to the mapped applications. Simple right? The really difficult part is making use of this information programmatically and applying it to your design. This is where Adaptivity’s many patents around IT planning and design come to the rescue. Our software will ensure all of the business and technology requirements are accounted for in the final design. Contact us today to learn more or click here to jump to the Blueprint4Cloud product page.

• Are you considering a cloud migration, data center migration or data center optimization?
• Do you have applications that are nearing end of life?
• Do you know all of your application interdependencies?

There are many tools which collect data that can be used to tell you the boundaries of an application and what that application is connected to but they all fall short in creating actionable, intelligent information. At Adaptivity, we transform data from one or many sources into visual information that is relevant to your task. We use our own software tools for services engagements as well as offer our software directly to end users so they can build the capability in house. Contact us today to learn more or click here to jump to the Blueprint Factory Services page.

There’s no magic behind our ability to rapidly and accurately assess current state in tremendous detail. The simple fact is that we utilize the same software products that we offer directly to our customers. Our software is capable of consuming data from just about any source and combining it with data from any of your other sources during our data enrichment process. Once the data is of sufficient quality our automated Blueprint engine takes over and transforms the data into actionable intelligence. If for some reason the output doesn’t look right there’s no need to worry. Correct the data and generate your Blueprints again. The combination of data enrichment and automation saves massive amounts of time and effort. Contact us today to learn more or click here to jump to the Blueprint as a Service page.

Application portfolio rationalization is the process of examining your entire application portfolio against the functionality provided to the business. Here are some of the questions answered during this process:

• How many and which applications directly support the same business activities?
• Are there any business activities currently without supporting applications?
• What can be optimized into business and technology services?
• Do any of my upcoming End of Life applications expose my business to unnecessary risk?
• Are my business drivers and IT supply properly aligned? (ex. Business activity requires high availability (HA) but supporting application does not have HA)

Finally, your CIO and CTO have the tools they need to make decisions based upon ALL of the relevant information, ALL in one place. Contact us today to learn more or click here to jump to the Blueprint4Cloud product page.

Our approach to building out our blueprints relies on data provided by our customers both through formal discovery tools and techniques and/or by static data they use to track their environments (spreadsheets, CMDB extracts, documents, etc.) When we received the customer’s data, we run it through our data quality check process to validate the content. If we find missing elements, we circle back with our customers and help them gather the remaining items we need. If our clients do not have the requisite data, we can provide a discovery tool to be used temporarily to capture the data we need for the project. In any case, we always provide our customers with a list of data elements required to generate the blueprints.

Our data gathering methodology has been developed based on a highly defined set of use cases and data quality requirements related to applications and host-level details. Our approach to capturing the appropriate data for blueprinting is governed by the following discipline:

• Project scope, which defines the critical requirements from an environment, application and server perspective
• Discovery Tool Deployment/Extraction, which provides the direct access to the customer’s data
• Three-phase ETL data import staging process is used to extract, filter, and merge data into a common data model, used by our Blueprint On-Demand software
• Creation and iteration of “living” blueprints, based on physical-, logical-, and transaction-level deployments that are designed to provide immediate decision support for in-flight data center migrations

Adaptivity Data Quality Analysis is a KPI metric-based waterfall method of determining the integrity, quantity, and usability of the data, in preparation for staging into our BP4Cloud Datamart and analytics engine.

Quality is detected by comparing the systems found via Blueprint4Cloud with inventory data. If data is not readily available in a source system, Adaptivity can bring to bear industry-leading discovery tools to facilitate the collection of all required data.

If you have licensed our Visualization Studio, you can keep your blueprints up to date by periodic scanning of the infrastructure using one of the industry-standard discovery and dependency mapping tools (BMC ADDM, HP DDMa, IBM TADDM, etc.). The scan data from these tools are loaded into Visualization Studio and your current and new blueprints are regenerated to reflect the most current state of your infrastructure. If you have not licensed Visualization Studio, you can take advantage of our Blueprint as a Service and Blueprint Factory to have your blueprints updated (still requires you to scan your environment and send you data to us).

Yes, Blueprints can be output into pdf format and entered as a CI or record into your CMDB. The relationships derived from our analytics can also be captured and entered as a record via xml or csv file format.

When changes occur during the project such as completion of move waves, changes in current state during the migration process, and so on, a new data collection run is required to update the data in the BP4Cloud Datamart and the current-state blueprints can be iterated to reflect the changed environment.

No, not unless otherwise required. Adaptivity prefers to leverage our customer’s data in whatever forms available so long as it includes the necessary data elements required to develop the appropriate blueprints. In addition, our Blueprint4Cloud tools are cloud-based solutions, so no installation of tools on our customer’s premises is required. However, if our customers require a discovery tool, Adaptivity will provide an appropriate agent-less tool on a temporary basis, which will be installed and run within the target infrastructure environment.

We will provide a list of the data elements and artifacts required to ensure we can build the requested Blueprints. Typically, discovery data provides the necessary host, applications and relationship data, and we ask for supporting applications architecture artifacts and business-context relevant (SLAs, criticality, RTO/RPO, etc.) information for architecture review purposes.

We do not typically need access to our customer’s environment unless requested to assist with data discovery. We anticipate receiving data from your CMDB, discovery tools, monitoring and performance tools and your application inventories and host lists. Adaptivity will provide a list of requirements prior to starting the project.

Data collected from our customers is typically transferred via secure ftp upload (SFTP) to Adaptivity’s Blueprint Factory located in Charlotte, NC. The data is secured and treated as confidential. Access is limited to individuals working on the project. Once the blueprints have been completed, vetted and accepted by our customers, all data transferred and located in Adaptivity’s Charlotte factory will be immediately destroyed per our Data Destruction policies, with a full copy provided to our client for future use.

Through applied Identity and Access Management policies and protocols in the Adaptivity Blueprint4Cloud software framework. Adaptivity is a multi-tenant factory blueprinting operation and uses separate physical and logical data stores for each client with strict identity and access management credentials. Assigned employees are the only ones who have access to the environments and access is only available for the duration of an engagement. Each employee is trained on the ETL and export processes necessary to work in these data mart environments and data are kept on secure remote drives accessible by VPN and directly on premises in Charlotte, NC.

Immediately at the end of the project as authorized by our client. The Adaptivity project team will submit a Certificate of Destruction validating that all client data has been destroyed at our facility in Charlotte, NC.

The results of the data analysis and blueprinting are verified through interviews with application and infrastructure managers and architects. Review sessions/workshops are also utilized to validate the data and resulting analysis, as required.

Yes. Adaptivity analysis data is typically supplied to our customers in a secure relational database format of preference. In addition, the data can be exposed by controlled secure login to Adaptivity’s SaaS environment.

Yes. Adaptivity approaches all projects from a business-driven, top-down approach that aligns your business requirements and demand characteristics with the supporting application portfolio and infrastructure. We collect “business context data” through our IT Planning Studio software and map the results with our Visualization Studio to the physical and logical implementations of your applications. Together, we can provide a comprehensive picture of your target environment, exposing the potential risks and impacts to the affected business environment, and the relationships and dependencies between the hosts and applications to be moved.

Yes. Network and Storage infrastructure can be captured by typical discovery tools and, in combination with network management tools (e.g. CiscoWorks) and Storage Management tools (e.g. Symantec Storage Volume Controller software), the merged data with the discovery tool can provide a very clear mapping of these particular dependencies.

No. Not at the current time.

No. Not at the current time.

• Are you considering a cloud migration, data center migration or data center optimization?
• Do you have applications that are nearing end of life?
• Do you know all of your application interdependencies?

There are many tools which collect data that can be used to tell you the boundaries of an application and what that application is connected to but they all fall short in creating actionable, intelligent information. At Adaptivity, we transform data from one or many sources into visual information that is relevant to your task. We use our own software tools for services engagements as well as offer our software directly to end users so they can build the capability in house. Contact us today to learn more or click here to jump to the Blueprint Factory Services page.

There’s no magic behind our ability to rapidly and accurately assess current state in tremendous detail. The simple fact is that we utilize the same software products that we offer directly to our customers. Our software is capable of consuming data from just about any source and combining it with data from any of your other sources during our data enrichment process. Once the data is of sufficient quality our automated Blueprint engine takes over and transforms the data into actionable intelligence. If for some reason the output doesn’t look right there’s no need to worry. Correct the data and generate your Blueprints again. The combination of data enrichment and automation saves massive amounts of time and effort. Contact us today to learn more or click here to jump to the Blueprint as a Service page.