Remote Infrastructure Management (RIM)

Remote infrastructure management (RIM) is a data center service in which the monitoring, management, and administration of a data center is facilitated by remote staff, reducing the need for physical visits to the data center.

Like Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software, RIM has become increasingly popular in data centers due to increased remote infrastructure deployments (i.e., colocation and edge data centers) leading to more distributed infrastructure and personnel, increased work from home, and increased need for tools that improve uptime and efficiency. Now, more businesses than ever are moving towards the remote management model.

What Services Does RIM Include?

• IT asset management
• Network management
• Storage management
• Application management
• Database management
• Migration services
• Server support and management
• NOC services
• Remote staff
• Desktop management

What Are the Benefits of RIM?

• Enhanced productivity and efficiency
• Improved business-critical service availability
• Measured service quality through well-defined service level agreements
• Focused energy on innovation rather than daily operations
• Reduction in overall risk
• Increased flexibility and capacity for future business needs
• Access to skilled resources to scale up or down based on business demands
• Increased application availability
• Improved business stakeholder satisfaction

Why is RIM Popular?

The IT infrastructure management process has significantly evolved due to the COVID pandemic. Previously, the IT team was responsible for monitoring and management, but due to the shift to remote work:

• IT teams now worked from home and could no longer be onsite to manage systems effectively.
• New technologies, such as teleconferencing, created significant security challenges that required a more expansive management system.
• Many organizations were facing financial hardships and needed to reduce costs.

What Are the Challenges of RIM?

RIM is a relatively new IT management structure, and there are many different RIM solutions available. When choosing to utilize an RIM system, organizations risk challenges with:

• Growth and scalability. Many IT decision-makers doubt their organization can maintain optimal uptime in a crisis with an RIM solution as the solution may not be able to scale at the same rate the organization does.
• Security. The FBI reported over 800,000 cyber-security attacks in 2020 with a reported loss of over $4 billion. An effective RIM solution should provide security against cyber-attacks, especially phishing, without interrupting employee productivity and performance.
• Automation. There are still some manual processes that have yet to be automated by RIM, making monitoring a more time-consuming process. However, there have been recent develops that have greatly improved automation, including the automation of network performance updates and security patch installation.
• AI/machine learning. RIM solutions have had issues with AI and machine learning in the past by being unable to provide accurate insights into this area of the IT infrastructure, including server uptime and network memory.

How Does RIM Compare to DCIM Software?

While RIM offloads infrastructure management to a third-party, DCIM software makes it easy for organizations to remotely manage all their global physical data center infrastructure from any location. It provides full visibility into all data center resources and capacities in a single pane of glass with remote 3D visualization of your data center that is even better than being there. DCIM software is proven to maintain uptime, increase the efficiency of capacity utilization, and improve the productivity of people.

Modern data center managers are increasingly leveraging second-generation DCIM software to:

• Remotely plan space, power, and connectivity. Color-coded floor maps display live measurements such as budget and actual power, cabinet weight, and percentage full to easily identify the ideal location to deploy assets. What-if analysis helps you understand the impact of additions and decommissions on capacity, and dashboard charts and reports make it easy to find stranded capacity.
• Direct technicians to complete changes accurately. Remote visualization of your data center to scale lets you show technicians exactly where to go. Cabinet elevation views provide the exact U position of your assets and device views with high-fidelity front and back images show technicians exactly where data and power ports are located to ensure connections are made correctly.
• Remotely monitor power and environment across multiple locations. An intuitive enterprise health dashboard displays real-time power and environmental health and events for all data centers in a single pane of glass with the ability to drill down for more granular cabinet-level metrics. Thresholds and alerts on power and environment automatically alert you of potential issues so you can quickly remediate them.
• Remotely manage all assets and connections across the entire deployment. DCIM enables a single source of truth with real-time views of all your physical data center infrastructure. Easily understand where assets are and how they are connected to avoid overloaded circuits and quickly troubleshoot issues to reduce downtime.
• Provide remote workers common views of dashboards and reports, improving collaboration and productivity for remote workers. Data center business intelligence dashboards can be created, edited, and securely shared with respect to granular role-based access control. This lets you manage to consistent KPIs across all functional teams and drives a culture of data collaboration.
• Ensure the physical security of data centers. Reporting, audit logs, and surveillance feeds allow you to know who has access to different areas of your data center, how often these areas are accessed, and if electronic cabinet door lock access attempts are successful or not.

Want to see how Sunbird’s world-leading DCIM software makes it easy for you to remotely manage your data center? Get your free test drive now!