The Hub Commentary ___

In a previous post (Accidental Cloud Leaders – Stealth Cloud Followers – Which Cloud is your IT On?) I wrote about these practices and cited a couple of industry articles.   My advice has always been that you outsource the commodity, why do in-house what everyone else has to do as well?  Why re-invent the wheel, accept a process and tool set that works for the rest of the world.

Focus on that which is unique to your business and is the value add to drive growth.  Unique and custom are seldom good candidates for outsourcing unless you are outsourcing the whole of your IT function and have a service provider also developing your value add innovations in the market.

This will bring a shift in the roles and skill sets in the data center as we know it today.  Service providers managing services with business savvy.  There will be requirements to focus on monitoring and managing the vendors and the requirement for an integration platform that brings the picture together as an end-to-end service regardless of where it is operating.

By all means, embrace the Cloud and as-a-Service providers for the commodity.  Learn how you will monitor and manage it on the commodity.  Apply those learning for the move to the more dynamic IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) to provide agility and on-demand capacity to your mission critical services.

Michele

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Companies looking to go down the SaaS route will find that IT service management is a good starting point says Ovum.  (read full article…)