Business Service Management Hub

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.

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.