Transforming Business Operations with Cloud, Big Data, and Integrated IT Management

Business operation and maintenance is not a new concept; business service management for traditional information architecture provides a solution that integrates business‑centric IT systems with IT infrastructure performance for unified operation.

However, as the Internet+ transformation advances, intelligent and widely cloudified infrastructure has become the new normal of IT development. Traditional operation methods that focus only on the stability and performance of IT infrastructure, systems, and applications increasingly fail to meet the rapid growth demands of enterprise business.

In the Internet+ era, business operation and maintenance is the product of deep integration between IT operations and the Internet, an inevitable outcome driven by cloud computing and big data technologies. Business operation focuses on user experience, is guided by business value, and strictly follows business operation monitoring indicator systems and evaluation standards.

By mapping the business processes of business, support, and management systems, and collecting, organizing, and correlating business data and IT performance through big data, the information is mapped in real time onto a global business topology diagram and visualized, helping managers navigate complex business and performance data to guide planning, achieve continuous application performance improvement, and drive rapid business growth.

Take the highly mature e‑commerce sector as an example: when an IT system fails, millions of users accessing the platform via browsers or mobile apps immediately encounter service‑unavailable error messages. Traditional IT‑centric operation modes lack deep understanding of business systems.

After receiving fault complaints from the operations department, each related system’s network, application, database, and host must be inspected one by one, resulting in long, inefficient fault resolution cycles that severely impact the business.

Therefore, the integration of business and IT in the Internet+ era first requires enterprises to shift from traditional operation models, combining proactive monitoring of infrastructure and system quality with a user‑experience perspective that correlates and inspects the actual support links of business systems, forming the basis for a business operation support platform.

Building a business operation support platform should start from three dimensions: business systems, business management, and IT support, effectively cataloguing all IT systems.

Business systems are the foundation of production and operation, the source of business data, covering marketing planning, sales management, customer management, and include ERP, transaction, order, payment, logistics, supply‑chain, CRM, etc.

Business management solves internal personnel and performance issues, encompassing business processes, results, efficiency, and evaluation.

IT support not only covers traditional IT infrastructure monitoring but also includes proactive monitoring of networks, application endpoints, and application performance management modules.

These three dimensions form a three‑dimensional model for business operation, and based on business and user‑experience metrics, a dynamic monitoring indicator system grounded in business quality is established, generating S‑KPI and KQI to provide a metric foundation for future operations.

The operations department maps the business systems, management, and IT support modules onto the underlying application topology according to the three‑dimensional model, then catalogs and correlates devices, platforms, cloud resources, applications/services, and external APIs within business processes, producing a layered logical architecture view of the business topology. Using user‑behavior‑driven end‑to‑end full‑stack performance diagnostics, globally distributed network‑based proactive user‑experience sensing, and cloud‑based stress‑test capacity planning, the system continuously collects, processes, predicts, and correlates business and performance data from various sources.

Finally, business metric data, performance metric data, and trend and prediction analyses are displayed in real time on a business operation dashboard.

Operations personnel can conduct system maintenance from a business perspective, quickly identify performance bottlenecks, and improve comprehensive management of business and system performance.

Operations staff can understand real‑time front‑end user experience, back‑end business systems, and underlying infrastructure relationships, responding correctly to incidents.

Enterprise managers can make accurate business decisions based on data analysis reports, confidently handling rapidly changing user demands and intense market competition.

When implemented in enterprises, business operation leverages big data technology to rapidly and efficiently integrate existing IT systems, enabling real‑time interaction and effective communication among users, products, and business processes centered on user experience and business value. This realizes networked and flattened production, operation, and management, laying a solid foundation for digital, networked, intelligent, and service‑oriented transformation.