This is not the first article about Business Service Management and cloud computing, and it will certainly not be the last. The one thing I’ve learned about the cloud, both private and public, is that this is new technology, and it is constantly changing. Companies setting up private clouds are adopting different technologies to make their lives easier, while public cloud providers are updating their products and APIs on a regular basis to improve and accelerate the transition. This leads to an exciting, dynamic environment that causes more challenges when implementing a BSM solution…or does it?

How exactly should BSM work with the cloud? Once cloud resources are incorporated into a company’s IT infrastructure, there needs to be a way to tie these virtual/cloud resources into the company’s business service views. Then the health of the business services will reflect all of the IT resources. And voila, problem solved. Now, I have been told I sometimes over simplify things, but when it comes to BSM, I don’t think people should look at “the cloud” as some complex, unknown entity. The cloud should simply provide another data source to be incorporated into a business service view.

BSM is only as powerful as its underlying integrations. How can one look at the availability of a service or the root cause of a service breach unless these metrics are driven by ALL of the underlying IT resources that make up this service? The resources in the cloud should not be treated as different, special data sources. Cloud resources need to be integrated with all of the existing underlying technology that drives the business service. Given how fast cloud computing technology is growing and changing, this will force BSM products to continue to create and enhance their underlying integrations. Of course, this is nothing new for BSM vendors, or any software vendors who integrate to third party software.

The cloud will continue to bring change to BSM, and BSM products will need to grow and evolve along with the cloud technology. But since BSM is based on underlying integrations, BSM is ready to go “to the cloud”.