Tag Archive | "Cloud"

Survey Says Managing Cloud is Chief Concern

Tags: BSM, Business Service Management, Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, IT, IT Management Tools, Monitoring, Service Level


Business Service Management Commentary on IT Service Management, Service Level Management & Performance ManagementWhat do you suppose worries businesses about transitioning to a hybrid cloud computing environment — that is one that includes both public cloud services outside the firewall and private clouds inside? Interestingly enough, it’s management, the subject of this Blog.

When asked in recent survey, what worried business most about cloud computing, a whopping 71 percent of respondents answered concerns about managing a hybrid environment. Ironically, according to an IT Pro article citing the survey results, in spite of this, 91 percent of respondents were thinking about a hybrid cloud.

The survey  was conducted by marketing and research firm Vanson Bourne for service provider 2E2.

What these findings show is that there is a huge disconnect between what companies think they want in terms of a cloud solution, and there ability to monitor, manage and deploy it. There is a lack of understanding of how to make sure the public cloud vendors are keeping to their Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and how IT as an organization can keep an eye on the entire organization, even as part of the infrastructure shifts to public cloud services.

There are tools, techniques and systems organizations can put in place that give that vision across systems. While there are limits to managing information outside the firewall, the ability to manage and monitor should absolutely enter into your decision-making criteria when choosing a public cloud vendor.

One other interesting data point found that more than half of respondents, 56 percent, were concerned about “losing control of their infrastructure.” While companies may be right that managing cloud resources is a difficult task, it’s also not impossible and there are tools available to help.

What we seem to be witnessing here is a transformation. In the first phase of cloud computing, IT was resistant. Now it seems to understand that the some form of cloud computing is coming, but there seems to be a lack of understanding, if these results are to be believed, about how to proceed and how to maintain control of the computing environment.

What they have to learn now is that total control outside the firewall is probably impossible, but some semblance of control is certainly well within reach, and there are systems that can help.

Photo by runran on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

What You Should Tell Your CEO About Cloud Computing – CIOInsight

Tags: CIO, CIOInsight, CIOUpdate, Cloud, Cost Reduction, IT Management Tools


The Hub Commentary_

Figuring out  facts from fiction will be key for CIO’s as they map out their cloud computing strategies and justify the investment to their CEOs.  Cloud Computing ROI will be measured in ways far beyond the typical promises of cost savings.  Business Service Management ROI can’t be overlooked as enterprises accelerate their way to the cloud.

Randy

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To borrow from Mark Twain’s famous remark about the weather, everybody talks about the cloud, but nobody knows anything about it. At a time when companies’ use of clouds is just getting started, the chief information officer’s judgment and store of knowledge are invaluable assets. These are especially important when the CIO sets out to educate that most important stakeholder of all, the chief executive officer.  (Read Full Article…)

Cloud CIO: 3 Private Cloud Use Case Scenarios – CIO

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Transformation, Virtualization


The Hub Commentary_

Bernard has put out a great piece for operations and development teams pragmatically discussing the development, implementation and operations of cloud projects.  Development of new services is the fit for new technology, otherwise, it becomes disruptive and costly to the whole of the IT organization.  Goes to that old addage, “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”.

Business service management practices help you to weigh the cost and value and most importantly, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.  Until an existing service outlives it’s usefulness or becomes a costly support burden, these services are not suitable targets for cloud infrastructures.

The three use cases are accurate and eye openers for the operations folks.  The time for push-back is over and it is time we work to become agile organizations.  In this case, Platform and Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers exist and are easily accessible with a credit card.  This is an expensive bypass, but the options exist and the crafty developers will most definitely go around operations to develop new services.  Then the time comes as Bernard points out, when the service needs to go into production and the infrastructure isn’t there and operations is not able to monitor, manage and support the new service taking more of a black eye.

The one thing 2011 has is an abundance of sourcing options and is the year we work toward common business goals and put the management systems in place that will help us to achieve these goals.

How agile is your operations team?

Michele

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Organizations looking to deploy private clouds must understand where they’re headed. A development cloud is an appropriate start, but consider these three scenarios for how use of your cloud will evolve — for better or for worse….. (Read Full Article…)

Cloud’s Next Benefit: Helping Companies Grow – Baseline

Tags: Baseline, Business Service Management, Cloud, Growth, Trends


The Hub Commentary_

Accenture research indicates 40% of all cloud knowledgeable business will use the cloud to drive new revenue over the next 5 years.  This is a shift from just leveraging it operationally currently to cut costs on infrastructure for irregular surges in capacity requirements or moving from an old system to a new one that is Software-as-a-Service based.

This is a typical approach and cycle, go after the low hanging fruit first to cut costs before a strategic use is put in place.  This should serve as a wake-up call to IT operations that it is coming and will you be ready to monitor, manage and communicate effectively when the infrastructure requirements are ready for production operations.  Monitoring, managing and measuring complex mixed environments will require one of three choices to be made:  1) Seek to an integrated, single vendor that has the platform to manage the infrastructure, 2) Build the integration yourself across your heterogeneous environment or 3) Seek an integration platform that is your manager of managers.

I find what was old is new again.  I’ve read many papers and sat through many analyst presentations as of late that call for the integration platform that will enable IT operations to stitch together the fabric of the infrastructure in order to continue to communicate technology as services.  Now more than ever it is important to get to measuring and communicating technology as services as it only gets harder in these mixed environments.

I agree with the parting comment by the author, Jeanne Harris, smart IT executives will jump on their preparation to not only define new revenue generating avenues, but also operations to support and manage the new services without delay.

How ready are you to manage services in the cloud?

Michele

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If an IT leader works for a company that isn’t named Amazon, Google or Facebook, chances are it hasn’t gotten a big revenue boost from the cloud. It’s much more likely that the company has used the cloud to cut costs, replace a standalone software application or back up older documents.  (Read Full Article…)

CIOs Need to Make Mobile-Social-Cloud Fit

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Enterprise IT, IT, Mobile, Social, Trends


Without a doubt the three trends having the biggest impact on the enterprise today are mobile, social and the cloud. These three elements have put the ability to access and share information easily into the hands of every employee with little or no intervention from IT, and from the perspective of some CIOs, that’s a very scary prospect indeed.

In a recent article on CIO Insight, A World of Risk: Are CIOs Up to the Challenge, author Irfan Salf looked at some of the risks associated with these technologies. Like it or not these, technologies are driving the movement toward what has been called the consumerization of IT.

In an article last week on Fortune, Brian Caufield talked about this trend saying that unlike the old days when IT dictated exactly what devices were allowed in the enterprise, and which ones were not, that power is fading fast as people (particularly executives) want to use their iPads and iPhones at work.

Beyond the devices, the cloud and social media tools bring another layer of simplicity for end users and complexity to IT pros in terms of monitoring and mitigating risk for the enterprise. The good news for users is that it means they can get their files anywhere from any machine, but conversely that could be bad news for you if it means dealing with compliance and governance headaches.

Like it or not , however,  the ship has sailed and you can’t really go back to the way you were before. The fact is that even as the cloud/mobile/social could life difficult for IT, locking down your enterprise is as counterproductive in its own way as shutting down the Internet was in Egypt in January. It hurts you as much as it helps you.

In the end these trends aren’t going away, and they can help build and enhance your business.  The fact is that you need to find a way to make this all work.

One way to do that is to use monitoring tools to help you get as big a picture as you can of your entire system. PC monitoring can help you track laptops. You can jump on the bandwagon and create custom apps to help you track mobile devices or you can give your employees access to your secure environment, so that when they are working on work-related materials they are better protected.

Just recently, I wrote about how companies like Box.net were changing the face of Enterprise software. One of the features of the most recent Box iOs release was aimed directly at this type of situation by giving your users SSO access to enterprise identity systems.

Instead of fighting against a change that can ultimately help your organization, look for ways to make it work for you and find ways to use the systems you already have in place. Monitoring tools can help you find that compromise you need to free your users, yet give you the control you need.

Photo by sfllaw on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License

Cloud Computing: A Sustaining or Disruptive Innovation? – CIO

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Innovation, Transformation, Virtualization


The Hub Commentary_

Today, I might agree that Cloud is somewhat disruptive, but for the right vendors it will be sustaining.  The mere fact that Amazon led the charge to change the purchasing model indicates that there is a desire for change in the industry just as they changed online purchasing forever.  The conversation that shifts this from disruptive to sustaining is the business service management discussion regarding cost and value and the appropriate deployment option.

This comes down to the planning and the best use of service providers and technology in your environment to deliver high quality services and drive value (revenue) for your organization.  We tend to focus way too much time (85% of the IT budget – 1-2% of revenue) on just operating rather than driving revenue and innovation for the business.

It’s not about The Cloud, it’s about using technology to drive revenue and differentiating services for your business.

What are you doing to drive growth for your business?

Michele

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If you’ve read this blog over the past couple of years, it should be no surprise that I am a huge advocate of the theories of Clayton Christensen, author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” Christensen and his book were brought to mind this week by the cover story in Forbes about his severe health problems, his experience with the U..S healthcare system, and his prescriptions for how to fix it.  (Read Full Article…)

Box.net Funding Signals Change in Enterprise IT

Tags: box.net, BSM, Business Service Management, Cloud, collaboration, Enterprise IT


Box.net, the plucky online and storage and collaboration play got a $48 million boost from venture capitalists recently. If you’re wondering why you should care, it’s because it shows that the VCs are backing the Box approach to software and that could have big implications for you moving forward in terms of enterprise software.

Box CEO Aaron Levie has never been shy about his disdain for the way enterprise software is sold or how difficult it is to use. In his view, enterprise software should be as simple to use as consumer software and for too long it’s been the opposite. He wrote on a blog post announcing the funding:

The world of enterprise information technology is changing dramatically. Prohibitive pricing models, inflexible infrastructure, and lack of end-user satisfaction are all unsustainable in today’s business environment

If you’re an IT Pro, that description has to sound familiar. Most enterprise software is expensive, difficult to maintain and end users generally don’t love their applications. Levie’s company is hoping to change the way enterprise software works by providing storage, collaboration and file sharing tools that are simple to use and maintain. Box does this in a couple of ways.

First of all it’s a cloud-based system. That means that all of the software elements are updated on the back end and as administrators you aren’t stuck trying to distribute every patch that comes down the pike to your end users. In addition, Box updates and changes the software on a regular basis. You get updates sometimes on weekly basis instead of a two or three year cycle.

Second of all, there are mobile pieces in place, so you can get your files any time and any place. Just last week Box released an upgrade to the iOS version of Box that provided some key enterprise pieces including document-level password protection and SSO login ability to access enterprise identity systems.

Box files sync across the system automatically, so no matter where you access your files, you get the most recent versions. Box also uses a freemium model to build interest from the ground up. Box’s formula is to let end users come to IT and tell them about the service, rather than the other way around. After they get the first wave hooked, they attempt to get the company to sign up for the paying version.

With today’s $48 million boost, Box should be able to build out its cloud infrastructure even further providing the foundation for an enterprise-class cloud-based system. And you should care because it shows that Levie and his company might be onto something and you need to understand what this means and how you can monitor and work with companies like Box in the future world of enterprise software.

Photo by Alexyv on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Is Cloud Computing About Productivity or Something Else? – ZDNet

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Cost Reduction, IT Management, IT Management Tools, ZDNet


The Hub Commentary

We’ve all had to “do more with less” in ever changing IT environments.  Cloud computing offers up an encouraging promise that we can actually “get more for less”.  But more of what?  Access to more applications, more compute power, more flexibility, more agility and certainly more innovation.

Randy

Cloud computing is more about agility, cost control and being able to do things previously impossible rather than increased productivity doing what the organization has always done.  Read more

Top Considerations for Moving to a Cloud-based ITSM Deliv Model-BMC Comms

Tags: BMC Communities, BSM, Business Service Management, Cloud, IT Management Tools, SaaS, Transformation


The Hub Commentary

SaaS is a delivery model and all services delivered by IT need to be categorized for their cost and value to the organization and the then the delivery model mapped to the service.  Highly custom, competitive advantage, differentiating services are not well suited for outsourced or SaaS delivery models.

Those services that are not unique to your organization and less integrated are very well suited for SaaS and outsourcing.  While you are likely offering a premium service to your organization, it is not necessary and outsourcing is just the ticket to standards and right sizing the service.

Many IT organizations hang on to the commodity because they have resources that can do it.  Just because they can do it, doesn’t mean they should do it.  Use your expensive in-house resources for the mission critical, unique, revenue driving services and shift the routine, commodity out of house.

ITSM and monitoring has often been something that could be offered as a service removing the infrastructure and the requirement for you to maintain resources that have knowledge of monitoring tools rather than you mission critical services.  We are fast approaching the day where much of the management is commodity and should be outsourced.

Are you right sourcing your IT management?

Michele

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Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is more than just a cloud-based delivery model. It is a service approach that IT organizations are considering for meeting their IT service management needs. With a SaaS model, IT organizations can focus their staff and infrastructure on high-priority activities and initiatives while still enjoying access to IT service management productivity solutions.  Read more

Virtualization And The Cloud: The Trouble Is Troubleshooting – Forbes

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Forbes, IT Management, Virtualization


The Hub Commentary_

In this survey, more than half the respondents have implemented some form of cloud computing (thus virtualization) citing increased flexibility and decreased costs in hardware, power, heating and cooling.  The challenge the article highlights comes in managing the network and pinpointing root cause of incidents, much less finding signs of trouble.

Management is always overlooked when trying to take advantage of the short term cost savings.  As my dad always told me, “short cuts never got anyone anywhere fast”.  Service enabling the infrastructure is a must from the development and implementation and never more so than now with the future being right sourced with hybrid implementations of private, public and physical infrastructures.

When I speak to folks about Business Service Management practices and tools, I’m often met with eye rolls and shrugs, but it is so hard.  I always respond, no it isn’, it’s only as hard as you want to make it.  It can be achieved a service at a time and can provide the real success in your cloud and virtualization projects with a bigger bang for the buck with short term savings and real value add up front.  All it takes is a little foresight to integrate the sources of data you have already to paint the picture that will help you manage in real time with a live view of the environment to manage both practively and with speed during an incident.

How are you service enabling your cloud and virtualization infrastructure?

Michele

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More companies are taking advantage of cloud computing and virtualization technologies to streamline their network operations, but significant management challenges remain, according to Network Instruments’ State of the Network Global Study.

The company’s fourth annual study surveyed 265 network engineers, IT directors and CIOs, located in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and Australia.  (Read Full Article…)

Improving the Business Value of SaaS Apps – Cloud Computing Journal

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Cloud Computing Journal, IT Management, SaaS, Service Providers, Service Value


The Hub Commentary

SaaS has the ability to move the cost of supporting infrastructure and applications from the in-house staff to a service provider, but these are the commodity services.  We have discussed in previous business service management posts that it is important to categorize services as value-add, differentiators or commodity, manage for cost.

While I agree with the author on his points of flexibility, configuration and customization, I caution that if it is a service that requires customization than: either 1) you need to reconcile if it is a commodity service and the standard can be accepted or 2) that it is a differentiating service and should stay in-house.

Services that are easy to defined, contained and non-differentiating are well suited for outsourcing.  Accept and embrace the standard, not all services are created equal and take the opportunity to impose standards for the commodity to drive down costs.

Do you have a service map for commodity versus value?

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Michele

Of all the three models of cloud computing: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS…SaaS (Software as a Service) is the one that has the most appeal and potential to evoke interest from enterprise CIOs.  The popularity of SaaS is expected to grow several times in the near future.  Read full article

Where Does the Cloud Go from Here? – ITBusiness Edge

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, IaaS, SaaS, Service Providers, Service Value


The Hub Commentary_

Wow!  We haven’t adopted or widely deployed the Cloud and are already asking where it goes.  As I’ve said many times before as part of a business service management practice, it is a delivery vehicle and as part of defining services we must evaluate the best delivery vehicle for the service based upon cost and value to the organization.

As a game changing technology, it is not the killer app.  It provides flexibility in capacity as an IaaS, it provides a low cost option as SaaS for commodity services and enables your in-house staff to concentrate on the value add to the business.  The Cloud will not grow your revenue as a technology, but as an enabler and a delivery vehicle in the right situations.

In the end, it takes a sound business service management practice and strategy to drive growth and be a game changer in revenue to your organization.

How do you define game changer in your data center?

Michele

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Even as many enterprises continue to struggle to determine what, exactly, the cloud is, there is perhaps an even more important question to ponder: “Where, exactly, is the cloud going?”  (Read Full Article…)

Eight Trends Driving IT’s Future – Baseline

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Cloud Computing Journal, Predictions, Service Value, Transformation, Trends


The Hub Commentary

Trend No. 4  “Server-centric to Service-centric”, predicts that architecture will shift from in-house servers to a distributed model in order to separate infrastructure, systems, applications and businesses processes from one another.   Take a look at the seven other trends Accenture says will continue to transform the technology landscape  in 2011 and beyond.

Randy

“The role of technol0gy is changing: it is no longer in a support role.  Instead, it is front and center driving business performance and enriching people’s lives like never before.” The real value of the report lies with insights on taking advantage of these technology shifts to gain business intelligence and business value.   Review  full report…

 

F500 Corporate IT, Cloud Innovators? – Cloud Computing Journal

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Cloud Computing Journal, Service Value, Transformation


The Hub Commentary_

Surprise cloud leaders in the F500 multi-billion revenue organizations.  These organizations are listening to their businesses and building private clouds with their vendors and learning to save and drive growth with appropriate capacity.  Understanding and driving service value into their organizations and business service management practices to reap the rewards of new technology.

Competing for the data center with the explosion of service providers starts to change the game in how IT approaches and delivers services.  This is a long over due change for IT organizations in an effort to becoming part of the business and leveraging technology to both operate and power the business.

Michele

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The way you know you’re in the midst of a technology shift and market disruption is when organizations don’t behave the way you expect them to based on past track records. Cloud computing has been filled with surprises and unexpected behavior from the get-go.  (Read Full Article…)

COBOL to Cloud Computing – Cloud Computing Journal

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Cloud Computing Journal, COBOL, Transformation


The Hub Commentary_

As an old COBOL, mainframe programmer, I still chuckle that the mainframe never did die as expected and I enjoy the commentary in this article about the processing power, thought in design and speed of the VSAM files over today’s relational databases and 4GL tools.  In those days, much time was spent on design for speed, use of space and read once for many output purposes.

As hardware and storage became cheaper and processing power increased, this attention to design has somewhat fallen out of fashion.  As the author describes, the portfolio and modernization must be evaluated as we have described in previous posts regarding the service, value and costs to the organization.  As a manager of a long time ago once told me, “Michele, just because you can re-write it, doesn’t always mean that is the right answer.”

The most interesting metrics as reported by Gartner in the article were that 60-80% of all business applications are mainframe COBOL and 90% of financial transactions are mainframe COBOL.  Astounding!

Michele

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With the exception of very small organizations, migrating to the cloud is not a simple switch that can convert them from an ‘ in-house’ data center to Cloud.  Large enterprises have to modernize much of their applications to adapt to cloud,…..  (Read Full Article…)

Is The Future of IT in BSM?

Tags: BSM, Business Service Management, Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, IT, VDI


Oh my, there was a lot of bad news about IT jobs last week. First of all Computerworld published a story called, As cloud grows, IT spending flatlines and then Forrester released a report suggesting that recent IT spending was actually hurting IT jobs growth. It’s enough to make an IT pro throw up his or her hands in despair.  But perhaps BSM could be the answer. 

While it’s clear there are some disturbing trends, it doesn’t have to be all gloom and doom. Let’s explore the numbers for a moment first. IDC says public cloud computing spending is going up at a fairly dramatic rate. This corresponds with a loss in IT jobs and the easy conclusion to make is that the shift to the public cloud is costing jobs (whether true or not).

Meanwhile, the Forrester report points out that companies are spending on IT infrastructure, yet not producing the corresponding jobs you would expect to coincide with that spending. What does it all mean?

It’s hard to find firm answers, but let’s assume that some of this jobs lag is due to trends like investments in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). By their nature these machines require less maintenance, at least on their face. You can upgrade them from the back end. You don’t have to deal with users downloading viruses, but these machines require far more network monitoring to be sure you are getting decent throughput across the system — and that’s where BSM comes in.

Same goes with the cloud. As I wrote recently in Cloud Control: Staying on Top of the Hybrid Cloud, “One consideration you might want to take into account when choosing an external cloud vendor is the extent to which it provides information for your monitoring systems.” As an IT professional one your big responsibilities in the future will be in monitoring your internal and external systems.

And these are just a couple of the small examples where BSM comes in. Remember, as a system BSM provides a way to monitor the health and well-being of your entire technology infrastructure, and it lets you see the business benefits of these technologies.

As you come to understand the information moving through these systems, you can begin to see the impact of technology across the entire organization and that kind of information is valuable.

That’s why I might not be exaggerating when I say that the future of IT might be in BSM because it is going to be increasingly important for organizations moving forward to understand the entire IT infrastructure and BSM can help you do that.

Photo by gwire on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Your Service Costs What?! Justifying Internal Chargebacks

Tags: Business Service Management, Chargebacks, Cloud, Monitoring, Private Cloud, Utility Computing


I remember when I first started working for a consulting firm back in the 80s, how surprised I was to find that departments inside a company charged one another for services rendered. Today, as IT moves to internal or private cloud environments, you are setting up a series of internal services, for which you charge back based on usage, and you better be prepared to justify those costs to your internal customers. 

In some ways, charging for private cloud services is infinitely more fair than in the client-server model where everyone might have divided the cost equally even if one department was using the server more than another. With a private cloud, it becomes more like a utility bill, where you pay for what you use.

But as I learned in my first work experience, when you charge for a service, you may find that people can find a cheaper alternative elsewhere outside the company, so you have to be able to justify your costs. The copy center was a good example. Consultants could use the in-house service, or they could go to another copy center (if company policy allowed this).

We liked to think we provided a unique service. We worked beyond regular business hours and we boxed and shipped the items, sometimes at the last minute under great time pressure. Sure, they might find it cheaper at another copy center, but those people wouldn’t necessarily put up with their unreasonable demands.

But as costs tighten for everyone, being able to provide a service you can trust in-house for a reasonable cost based on understandable and measurable terms, becomes even more important than it was back in the 80s when I started my job. That means making sure your services are easy to access and use and guaranteeing certain service levels.

You can ensure that your systems and services are up and running by providing your IT department with solid monitoring tools that provide real metrics about up time. This can work in two ways. First of all, it lets your IT staff know when something isn’t working so they can react and fix it immediately.

Secondly, it gives you metrics that you can share with your internal customers to let them know in a fully open and transparent way just how often you are up (or down as the case may be). When you have solid data about the health and well being of your whole system, you can better justify the cost of the services you offer through that system, leaving you with a group of customers who might not always like the cost of the services, but at least understand what it is they’re paying for and why.

Photo by alanclever_2000 on Flickr. Used under the Creative Commons License.

Cloud Control: Staying on top of a Hybrid Cloud

Tags: Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Monitoring, Private Cloud, Public Cloud


Just last week, IDC released a report on the growth of cloud management software over the next several years. A Computerworld article discussing the report said these results highlight the importance of having a solution in place to monitor a hybrid cloud environment.

The hybrid cloud refers to a set of services that encompasses both public cloud solutions from companies like Amazon S3, Salesforce.com and Verizon, as well as private clouds built in-house behind the firewall.  According to IDC, in fact, by 2015, the cloud management software market will grow to $2.5 billion.

According to the Computerworld article, this software will include:

“…virtualization management, automated provisioning, self serve provisioning portals, dynamic consumption based metering and capacity analysis, service catalogs, end-to-end real time performance monitoring and related management software tools deployed into public and private cloud environments.”

As an IT pro, you need to be thinking about how this will affect your own company moving forward. Of course, this will involve deciding which services are better kept in-house and which are best out-sourced to the public cloud. Many factors will come into play when making these decisions including cost versus security considerations.

Regardless, being able to find ways to monitor the entire cloud environment both internally, and to the extent possible, externally, will be increasingly important as you move forward. One consideration you might want to take into account when choosing an external cloud vendor is the extent to which it provides information for your monitoring systems.

Some like Amazon S3, for instance, provide data you can use in your monitoring tools to measure and understand up time and other key metrics. You will want to take into account how easily you can independently monitor your external cloud services because chances are you will be judged by your internal customers based on your ability to understand and control the entire system–whether it’s internal or external.  Finding tools and vendors that give you the ability to understand the whole picture will be increasingly important as you make the transition to cloud services.

Photo by Lars Ploughman on Flickr. Used under the Creative Commons License.

Eight trends to drive future of IT: Accenture – CBR

Tags: Accenture, Business Service Management, CBR, Cloud, Social Media


The Hub Commentary_

Social platforms in IT have actually been there, just as prevalent in the business.  Most of us use a Wiki or some sort of shared collaboration and we update it with information as we come by it and correct information others have posted, etc.  Most of us have been to Wikipedia at least once.  The ability to manage massive amounts of data about devices in the work place becomes challenging as they become mobile, connected and disconnected through multiple forms of connections.  Self service and social platforms are accepted forms of keeping many sources of the data up to date and accurate.

Think about it, most of us do not keep rolodexes any longer.  We expect our friends and colleagues to update their own online cards with the most accurate data and we access it in real-time when we need it or capture it when they phone or email us next, why not with the assets and data in the work place?

Michele

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Report says social platforms evolving as new source of business intelligence; cloud computing as driver of business growth

The future of information technology (IT) will be dominated by data, with social platforms evolving as a new source of business intelligence, and cloud computing delivering on IT’s role as a driver of business growth, according to a new report from Accenture.  (Read Full Article…)

One Size Most Definitely Does Not Fit All – Cloud Computing Journal

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Cloud Computing Journal, End-to-End View, Integration, IT Management


The Hub Commentary_

I read this post by a friend of mine and I couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly.  Cloud computing by the nature of it screams heterogeneous environment versus a single vendor framework homogeneous environment.  I also screams requirements for an integration platform and business service management practice to manage the services consuming the technology.

I suppose my first question to someone would be “why consider the agility of cloud computing if you are seeking a single vendor framework?”  The speed at which the market is exploding with varying as-a-Service offerings, whether it be infrastructure, applications, storage, etc. indicates that you must consider and determine how best you will monitor and manage these threads of technology as a service fabric holistically.  The requirement for an end-to-end view of the service is possible in real-time with the right approach to integrating the metrics from the various sources of monitoring whether they be in your data center or provided by the service provider.

Finally as this pains me to mention again and will have to be the last time this year, there is taking advantage of the technology for business growth and opportunity, as was done this past Sunday for 5 hours in Texas Stadium.  During opportunities of promotional selling, the ability to dial up/down services, reposition capacity to insure the greatest opportunity to reap the benefit of the customer interaction will be the key to agile computing and business growth in the future.

Michele

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Larry Ellison let it be known at the recent Oracle OpenWorld (an ironic name if I ever heard one) that he saw nothing wrong with companies using just Oracle solutions across the entire enterprise. Of course, he would think that given that he runs Oracle. But these days, more often than not, you are going to find multiple solutions from a variety of vendors, and you need a cloud solution that is going to support them all.  (Read Full Article…)