Management of information technology infrastructure in the power utility - A consolidated approach

The operation of a power utility enterprise requires many different levels of information processing, storage and exchange, both at the industrial process level and at business and enterprise levels. The integration of the information flow across the power utility implicates a new consolidated approach to the management of the associated IT infrastructures and services incorporating both IT platforms and communication networks through which different application processes exchange information. A new process-oriented model is to be proposed in order to define and locate the different management functions both for the infrastructure and the associated services. The blurring of the boundaries between IT and communications Operational management, Administration and Security renders necessary a new approach covering fault, performance and security management functions in a converged manner and providing network-oriented, user-oriented and business-oriented views of the global system for the different management actors. Finally, the consolidated management of the information infrastructure allows a convergent view of the processes and applications, the servers and platforms on which the applications are running, and the network infrastructure used for their exchange of information, allowing in this way to correlate between their respective events. This paper examines the challenges and opportunities for the consolidated management of power utilities' IT infrastructure allowing end-to-end visibility across multiple domains and services in order to manage every component of the IT environment (user, application, system and network), and covering the entire system from substation to business level