Business Service Management Hub

Why aren’t we at Service Level Agreement (SLA) nirvana?  I mean really, we have had SLA tools for 10, 15 years or more.  You probably have 1 or 10 or more tools that measure SLAs, of which most probably aren’t used.  Why aren’t all of our data centers, applications, servers and everything else just numbers on some dashboard that we just glance at to make sure everything is good to go and that we are open for business?  This troubled me so I decided to make a list of some of the possible reasons:

1.  Too many different tools, specialties and areas of focus

You have tools the measure SLAs for the network, different ones for the infrastructure, different ones for virtual machines, different ones for the cloud, and the list goes on and on.  I think this is one of the biggest issues with SLA reporting.  Who wants to look at 3 – 10 different tools to know if they are passing all of their SLAs?  Or who wants to maintain integration into all of those tools to then pull all of that data into one dashboard?  And then what do you do if someone wants to see historical data?  This becomes a very deep and very big hole. So then companies move on to my number 2 reason.

2.  SLA monitoring via trouble tickets

Wow, this is great.  Finally one source for all of our SLA data.  All we have to do is make sure every issue we have gets opened as an issue in our help desk tool.  Right!  The issue eventually happens that you missed an outage and that outage caused you to violate your SLA.  Then the logic pervades the company something like: ‘If our tool missed that SLA, what else is it missing?’  And eventually: ‘We just can’t trust this tool’ or ‘We just can’t trust our monitoring’ etc.  Also, this is dependant on someone putting in the correct data and time.  Not to say they would purposely fudge the numbers but how long would you say something was down that you were responsible for?

3.  SLA status based on Network availability

Ok, we have all been guilty of it.  If you have ever had to guarantee 5 9’s availability, you reported on just the network availability.  Why?  Because you had the data, your data met what was expected ( 5 9’s ) and you could easily report on it.  Did that meet the intention of the SLA?  No, but (insert your excuse here).  When someone that cares about an SLA defines it as 99.999% availability, they truly want to be able to access the application or business function 99.999% of the time not just the network.  This is discussed further in item 5.

4.  Can’t get the data.

Sometimes we just can’t get at the data that we would need in an automated fashion to allow us to have an SLA  defined.  This may be due to  political or technical issues, I am sure you have seen both.  This must be resolved with either the customer pushing for it or someone pushing for the customer.  In the IT world we live in today, virtually all data is accessible with permission and ingenuity.

5.  Technical vs business data

This one is also very common.  You report you are meeting your SLA of 99.999% up time and the customer says, ‘but it is never available when I need to use it.’  Been there?  Why is this?  Because you are reporting that all of the things that you are responsible for technically, are available.  But when the customer goes to use the application or business service, some piece that he uses and you might not be responsible for isn’t functioning or responding in a timely manner, etc.  Does this make your SLA data wrong?  Yes, from a customer perspective (and does anything else really matter?).  Your SLA must be looked at from the business point of view as much as possible.  Now, you won’t be able to take into account the customer’s home network being down and then having that blamed on you, but if you have enough data showing the service was available from a business point of view, you will be able to push back on them.

What do I mean about monitoring the SLA from a business point of view?  Well, it means a few things and these will change depending on how your customer uses the service.  Through put, response time, transactions processed per time period, synthetic transaction, functional status of all single points of failure for the service.

6.  Data is too bad

When you do get everything monitored and all of the data in one source, sometimes the data is just too bad.  Instead of 5 9’s, you’re showing 5 7’s.  So instead of showing this to the customer or management instead you (insert your excuse here).  This issue can be overcome by either going into the underlying tools and fixing the monitoring to only report outages when they are outages or by fixing your applications and infrastructure.

7.  SLA’s just a punishment tool

I have seen this in many different companies.  You struggle to meet the SLAs and whenever you miss, here comes the stick.  This will then motivate you to either fix the issues or quit reporting.  Too often I have seen the later.  This doesn’t have to be.  Used correctly SLAs can be a carrot and a stick. They can allow you to qualify exactly what is part of the SLA and what hours you are responsible to meet the SLA, thereby reducing/eliminating penalties for off hours and devices that aren’t part of the service or not in you control and then allow you to better meet the SLA for the true service times.  SLAs need to have the carrot to be managed effectively.

As we have remained in a reactive mode for many years, now is the time to turn that around into proactive and aligning with the objectives of the business.  In the next post we’ll talk about how you turn this around and stitch together a successful Service Level strategy.

What would you add to this list of challenges?

Lee Frazier

The Hub Commentary_

In the next 12 months the Corporate Executive Board predicts that one of the driving IT trends includes the end-to-end views of managing technology as business services.  The complexity of the environment is turning business service management practices into an imperative versus a nice to have.

The re-focusing of resources on growth and driving revenue is coming more and more to the forefront, while still balancing good cost conscience practices, but the time has come to move from only focusing on operating to driving growth.

This is a great article and the close is spot on, those that drive growth and put good business service management practices in place will lead their industry and the others will play catch-up.  It’s not about IT and business aligning, it’s about driving the business forward with technology.

How are you growing your business with technology?

Michele

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Demand for increased business-partner control of IT is coming from opposite ends of the workplace spectrum: senior business executives and frontline end users.  IT in 2011: We’re Managing Information, Not Just Technology….. (Read Full Article…)

I had a meeting with a customer the other day which was centered on virtualization and private cloud and a funny thing happened: it morphed into a Business Service Management (BSM) discussion.  The discussion got me trying to put my arms around “BSM in a virtual environment” and what it means.

In a traditional BSM scenario, you are managing your IT from a business perspective with the ability to drill into the business models until you can isolate and correlate the technology supporting the business service.  But in a virtual environment, you’ve abstracted another layer, right?  For example, my order processing is running slow.  Which is of more value to me?  The first layer down tells me that the virtual database server is experiencing a performance hit or knowing that the underlying network-attached storage is living in a network segment that is currently overloaded due to end of the month processing?

To be honest, I’m not sure there is a clear answer.  I think if I am the “break/fix” guy, I need to know at the lowest level so I can attack the problem in the infrastructure.  And of course, the business unit wants to know at the highest level that order processing is experiencing a slowdown.

What my conclusion was is that at the highest level, BSM hasn’t changed.  You are still mapping out your business processes to show the health of the process flow and the performance of the service.  But, to accurately or perhaps more appropo, usefully, map the technology to the business process, you need to have the virtual abstraction layer, which has the actual infrastructure mapped to it.  This could lead to some interesting analysis, such as response times across the virtual environment compared to response times in the physical environment and how they both correlate to performance of the business service.  Just some food for thought.

I’d be interested to hear about some real-life examples.  How are you monitoring the virtual?

The Hub Commentary

All things in moderation yes…but I’m convinced a healthy dose of “March Madness” can actually give a boost to office and employee morale and reduce some workplace tension.   Just don’t let it get too carried away and I bet you might even find that filling out a tournament bracket and following your favorite team(s)  improves productivity and gets some adrenalin pumping in your ever hardening veins.

Randy

Nearly one third of bosses say that the NCAA Basketball Tournament activity should not be allowed in the workplace, but 80% of employees say that major sporting events such as “March Madness” present no distractions from work duties.  Read more here

The Hub Commentary_

The continuation of centralizing, sharing, cost saving with the commodity IT.  These are short term savings that improve the bottom, however, do not improve the top line.  These are required and must always be on the agenda, balanced with growth initiatives.

The article mentions while providing higher performance and availability or quality of service.  These initiatives work to drive the top line in customer retention and new services for the business.  It is all a balancing act, but the key is not to lose sight of the long term growth for the short term save.

Michele

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Cloud and virtualisation also on the agenda

CIOs across Europe have identified IT consolidation as a key near term initiative as they look for ways to maintain or improve performances despite the economic situation.  (Read Full Article…)

I have been asked many, many times “what is the return of a business service management project / practice”.  The answer is honestly, “it depends” on your environment, how much efficiency can be driven into it, how much consolidation, cost of outages, the list goes on.  However, I know that is absolutely the answer everyone despises and I can say by NOT tackling a shift from technology to services, it costs you 2% of revenue (at a minimum) every year.

Thus, I put my old analyst hat back on and thought as an analyst what would I do?  Create a model by which to calculate and start building out a business case.  I have put this basic information into a short presentation and have added it to our resource page.  The first link is a streaming slide presentation and the second is a self contained PDF file with sound.  The PDF file takes a few minutes to download, but you can share the file as you like.

The objective with this slide show was to bring together the statistics from many analyst papers, provide a simple model and understanding of what it costs you to not manage services.  We are at a tipping point this year with agile technology, new deployment options and competitive cost models.

This post goes hand in hand with the previous Featured Post on Finding Your Services.  Know how to identify and classify your services for service value.  The next in that series will be examples of services and the start of a service catalog.

Let me know your thoughts on this!  How are you getting to service value and what does it cost you?

Michele

Click Here – This is the streaming slide show and is just over 6 minutes.

Click Here – This is the self contained PDF download – 8M download, it does take a few minutes to download and start, but you may share accordingly.

Hub Commentary

I’m putting my money on Watson!  After all the world’s most famous supercomputer runs on IBM’s high-performance, high-capacity Power servers and SUSE Linux Enterprise is the fastest operating system on POWER7.   Let’s see how it all comes out on Feb 14th!

Randy

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An epic showdown of man vs. machine kicks off Feb. 14, 2011. That’s when “Watson ,” a computing system from IBM, will face off against “Jeopardy!” superstars Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Can an artificial intelligence-driven machine overcome championship-level human minds? With Watson, the key challenge isnt a command of statistics and factoids. Its a matter of programming a computing system that can pick up the subtle nuances of the game show.  (Read Full Article….)

The Hub Commentary_

The article references the cost of a single cost of downtime as approximately $100,000 and the risk of downtime increases as systems and infrastructures become more and more distributed and complex.  Now more than ever, services must be service enabled from a proactive monitoring perspective before it goes live into a production environment. Management cannot be an afterthought and also keep in mind, not all services are created equal.

Service enabling and creating adequate redundancy comes at a cost and has to be weighed against the value the service contributes to the business.  Managing the infrastructure as services is an imperative in 2011 to balance cost and value, while insuring service quality and availability.

Integrating the metrics from various technologies and make sense of them as an end-to-end service becomes critical in proactively managing services in real-time and taking action based upon leading indicators that illustrate risk of an outage is rising.  Mitigating risk and reducing downtime must be a factor of service enabling the infrastructure as it goes live in production.

As the article states, the cost of down time is high, catastrophic and the scavenger hunt that ensues to solve and restore service leads to lengthy downtime and is costly to your organization.  As technology professionals, leveraging new technology and deploying agile infrastructures is just a piece of the puzzle, management and service enabling the infrastructure is equally as important.

This is the year of investment in IT technology as well as it’s management infrastructure to service enable the infrastructure to insure it continues to execute in market time.

Michele

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North American businesses are collectively losing $26.5 billion in revenue each year as a result of slow recovery from IT system downtime according to a recent study. The study also indicates that the average respondent suffers 10 hours of IT downtime a year and an additional 7.5 hours of compromised operation because of the time it takes to recover lost data.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Tobin and I had the opportunity to speak with a new friend, Bojan Simic, yesterday of TRAC Research.  We shared thoughts on what is required to deliver Business Service Management (BSM) and help organizations communicate Service Performance thus Value to their organizations.

As Bojan writes in his last BSM post, there are many management tools, each has a strength and in all likelihood you have many in your environment.  In fact, we shared there are those with a half dozen, those with a dozen and those with >2 dozen.  Yes, I said 2 dozen and greater.  Each of these contributes a piece to the story, but what is really required is the integration platform that brings it all together in a single view representing Service Performance.  By Service Performance we mean, it’s availability, performance, volume of business transactions, etc.

The environment is becoming ever more complex and agile requiring the integration and automation that will bring all the data together that allows your IT organization to take full advantage of the best in breed monitoring tools.  With this end-to-end visibility in real-time you can then make sense of what you have, consolidate where necessary and potentially take advantage of lower cost open source options potentially.

The investment is in the integration and intelligent view of the infrastructure.  Where are you investing today?

Michele

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Preliminary findings of TRAC’s end-user survey show that organizations are still struggling to gain full visibility into their IT services and infrastructure. Many of the organizations surveyed are reporting that, even though they made significant investments in new IT monitoring and management tools and increased the amount of performance data that they have on hand, they are still not seeing any significant improvements in key performance indicators (KPI).  (Read Full Article…)

Service Value is the Next Generation!

Time for ITIL.  Year-end is always a good time to watch the predictions fly and I too had to add 4 to my friend Richard Whitehead’s post with his top 10.  In my post I made a prediction that this would be the year that ITIL begins to wane as a topic of conversation for a couple of reasons.  Last week reinforced one of those beliefs with a CIO article I commented on, “ITIL versus the Cloud:  Pick One”.  Even this week, I still cannot wrap my head around this article and this is where my reasons for ITIL waning is deeply rooted.

First, I will mention I have been ITIL Foundation certified 2 times (version 2 and version 3) and was around in the service desk world during the days of all the little books for version 1.  Yes, I started working when I was 12.  Seriously, ITIL is prescriptive, not a remedy.  It is guidance about processes, not a mandated set of principles by which to govern an IT organization to the point of suffocation.  I have done my fair share of consulting and once folks get past the hurdle that it is merely advice, adapt it to what makes sense in their environment without suffocating, then the sessions are more successful.  However, I find that ITIL is one of those topics I would rather not discuss in mixed company, much like politics or religion, as it brings out very passionate debates and you need to know the party lines to consult.

Why do I believe it is really waning, it’s an inward facing operational process that is expected, it is a consulting and training industry.  Business doesn’t want to hear about how you do your job, just that you do it, do it well and do it efficiently.  It’s like this, as consumers we take our cars to the shop for routine maintenance and fixes when things break and what we are most interested in is how much will it cost and when will it be done.  We don’t really care what processes and procedures the mechanic follows or how many certifications he/she has to perform the job, we just care he/she can do the job, do it well and cost efficiently.  So why is it as IT professionals we go to work everyday and speak jibberish to our business colleagues?

I would find it a safe bet that your business would love to hear you come in and tell them exactly how implementing an updated service, a new technology, or automating a process will reduce XYZ cost, will drive XYZ additional revenue and this is how we will monitor Service Performance mitigating risk of service impacting events.  Just as this article implies, ITIL is very silo focused still.  Sure version 3 speaks of a service lifecycle, lifecycle not so much on the service performance and value to the business.

Here is a picture to help explain, click on it to enlarge it.  ITIL is going through a process maturity as well.  Here are the stages:

• version 1 – Processes Identified as individual processes
• version 2 – Processes Integrated
• version 3 – Process Lifecycle
• version 4 – still to come and already too late

I’ll end with this, I’m not against ITIL if it is taken as a prescription, training, examples.  However, when it becomes the way we speak to our business and customers and our sole focus, I find it like new technology for the sake of technology.  When I read articles about How to Justify an ITIL Project to the Business, I know the service providers are knocking on your door to take over your data center because they speak in terms of creating efficiencies, saving money and driving revenue.

We have lost all focus when we start speaking in terms of a new technology not fitting ITIL and choose one.  In that situation, I’d leverage new technology and work to service enable it to manage it, control it and communicate the value it is delivering to the organization over ITIL as it is, again, merely training, prescription and examples

The only thing I can guarantee is change and technology evolution are sure things.  As technology professionals, we must be seeking automation, technology and methods by which we can start communicating to our business in their terms.  Communicating Service Performance, Growth and driving Value into our businesses is the focus of those that lead their industries with technology.

I believe the explosion of cloud computing and the service provider market will be the catalyst described by Nicholas Carr’s article, “IT Doesn’t Matter”.

I know this controversial, give me your thoughts!

Michele

The Hub Commentary_

What does the midsize market know that the enterprise ignores?  Nimble, think like a start-up, how do we we better serve our customers and how does IT communicate service performance and use technology to create great customer relationships.

Time to think about the revenue generating services and customer touching services.  It’s not about the end user within the organization.  Think about it, who else in the world outside of IT even knows what end user means.  It’s about the customer that buys your companies products and services, focus on service enabling and communicating service performance and value of those services.

Quality of the customer experience is king, what are you doing to enhance it?

Michele

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70% of midsize companies are actively pursuing analytics technology to better understand their customers and make better decisions.  (Read Full Article…)

Free Summary – EMA Radar for Business Service Management: Service Impact Q3 2010  – Enterprise Management Associates(Read Full Summary Report …)

The Hub Commentary_

“Visionaries have an innovative and disruptive approach to the market, but their services are new to the market and are unproven,” Gartner  Yes, this does describe Amazon and EC2, but does that mean it is 2 steps behind the Leaders?  Not often are there times to truly innovate and redefine a market.  Amazon and EC2 are redefining an industry regardless of internal enterprise IT or the consumer market.  Their customers are a mixture now over the traditional IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) IT service providers.

To the innovator go the initial spoils, revenue in the market.  Will or can they sustain that leadership will play out over time.  Given where we are in the life cycle of this disruptive technology (mostly development and test) in Enterprise IT shops, EC2 brings just the agility required for businesses to drive agile development of new products and services and move to market faster than ever before mimicking the consumer market.

In order to take these early development projects to production, yes, more formalized monitoring and management will no doubt need to be baked in.  Now the question becomes, who bakes that in and supplies that information?  Isn’t that agent part of the workload that is packaged and shipped out to the cloud to run on the subscribed to infrastructure?  I call this service enabling your workload and injecting intelligence into it for purposes of monitoring, securing and communicating the performance of the workload the subscribers responsibility.  Right?  The provider is responsible for the infrastructure your workload runs on, not what’s going on in the workload, that remains the responsibility of the subscriber.

I applaud Amazon and say keep challenging the status quo.  IT and the traditional proven providers need to think a little out of the box to meet the demands of market dynamics in market time! What do you think?

Michele

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Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report has placed Amazon’s cloud computing service in one of its lower tiers, saying that for all of Amazon’s commercial success it is “visionary” but “unproven.”  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary __

Beth’s opening statement regarding the Aberdeen findings sums it up, mid size organizations are under performing larger organizations.  Pick up the Fortune 500 list as I do each year and look at the top 5 in each industry.  There are 3 things that always standout:

1. Those that lead, know how to harness the commodity of technology to not only power, but drive business.
2. Those that lead, lead by magnitudes greater than their followers.
3. Those that innovate, change how a market functions, don’t always stay on top.  Check out where eBay is for example.  The innovator often gets leapfrogged.

Beth references a previous article my good friend Glenn O’Donnell of Forrester is quoted offering the following 5 pieces of advice:

1. Consolidate management tools
2. Invest in Network Change and Config Mgmt
3. Application awareness
4. Pay for analysis, not monitoring
5. Get more from existing tools

2011 will be the year IT transforms to measure business performance and ties the analytics to the data to drive business performance, not IT or technology performance.  Use technology for the mundane and routine, measure performance, reduce costs, do more with less and measuring the network and application performance regardless of where it resides will be key to having that complete view of business performance to use technology to improve that performance in clever ways.

Michele

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If you’re overseeing performance management initiatives at a midsized organization — one with annual revenue between $50 million and $500 million — then you probably have a thing or two to learn from your counterparts at larger enterprises.  (Read Full Article …)

Setting up a tool that performs some type of end user performance testing is not enough, it is a type of testing that provides a view of the end user experience of using a part of a specific service.   Adding Service Level Management on top of the testing is still not enough.

Business Service Management is a bit more encompassing, when there are slow response times, which piece of the supporting technology is the culprit, is this something that can (or needs to) be addressed now?   If we were to take this slow database offline in order to address the issue, what impact would that have on the enterprise or end users.  Business Service Management helps with these problems and more.  End user response time measuring is just a piece of BSM, it might be a good starting point, but don’t be fooled, you are not done.

Remember there are several layers in the OSI model and having a health indicator from each of those layers (or several at least) is going to provide a better picture end to end of the health of the service.  The big management tool vendors typically compete against each other, the typical model is rip and replace, they sell you new tools and get you to stop using the old tools… very expensive and disruptive proposition.  Since there is no single vendor that is the best of breed for each of the OSI layers, then a single vendor for the end to end management doesn’t make sense.   It makes more sense to purchase some of the tools to do specific types of monitoring, leverage opensource to monitor some of the other aspects and then roll all of these together into a single end to end view.   This approach allows you the ability to swap out tools when they become dated or when the vendor is trying to hold you hostage at renewal time.

Having a single console that is able to integrate with all of the underlying technologies managing the environment and providing an end to end view is a better way to manage the enterprise, using a response time tool and crossing your fingers that everything will work out is risky.

Tobin

The Hub Commentary     __

I tend to agree with the increased focus on performance and end-user monitoring and believe it will be driven by the requirement to monitor the service providers as cloud services are incorporated.  Controlled change management with an end-to-end view of the complex infrastructure will work to mitigate risk and both will rely on an integration platform and strategy.

Open Source monitoring for the commodity will also rise in popularity and implementation, but I don’t agree with building more into the monitoring tools or waiting for one vendor to build a single framework.  A single vendor framework is and has never been built ground up to monitor and manage the data center.  The big four all grow through acquisition of many technologies and cobble them together through data layer integrations.  No offense to my vendor friends, I’ve been a product manager for one of them and did exactly the same thing after an acquisition was made – it’s the quickest way to claim integration victory.

I believe we will see data centers leveraging Open Source, Cloud services for both Services (commodity management – ala ITSM tools) and Infrastructure (to test out excess capacity and demand flexibility options); rise in both availability and performance monitoring for new technology and delivery methods; and end-to-end visibility requirements to mitigate risk and speed restoration time.  All of this is solved and future proofs the data center by considering a  sound integration platform and strategy pulling together the physical, virtual, cloud environment into a single view for monitoring, managing and measuring.

Push your suppliers to build the best monitoring/management tools possible and leverage an integration platform to bring the best of your investments together to transform your data center into a service provider.  Oh yeah, 2011 will be the tipping for data center transformation into a service provider – not technology manager.

Michele

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Depending on where they stand in the overall environment, network and systems management companies hear different concerns from their enterprise IT clientele. Here’s a look at how the year will shake out in a number of different areas … (read full article…)

What does the post-recession IT world look like? More media will drive the need for more bandwidth, and a demand for Windows 7 upgrades and corporate use of personal smartphones will shape new priorities for IT.  (read more…)

The Hub Commentary ___

Think like a start-up sums up what I was thinking as I read this article.  Good long and short side views in the IT news these days.  This is a great thing, there is activity again and feels like budgets are loosening for the right spirit.

Here’s what I mean by short and long sided.  Cost savings by reducing infrastructure – To the Cloud!  Hidden costs to monitor, manage, support, secure and protect.  Rarely is it cheaper to outsource unless you are a hideously inefficient organization.  However, right source is the right approach.  Another example are all the new technologies mentioned in the article.  I’m sure there is an expectation for performance, availability, information accessibility and many platforms and by the way we are starting with mobile now.  Again, that pesky back-end monitoring, managing, supporting,  securing, protecting and measuring.

The consumer market drives business requirements and thus IT.  The introduction of every new technology to the consumer market should immediately be thought of as entering the enterprise and thus evaluated for it’s application and potential value-add or not.  Business is still ahead and IT is still out of synch reacting.

2011 is going to be a tipping point of a year for alignment of IT to become a service enabling organization with agility.  The IT manager that begins thinking like a start-up to meet the requirements, embracing new technologies and building management in from the get go will be the winner in the long run.

Is your IT an Operating Commodity   or   Contributing Necessity?

Michele

Being that we’re at the start of a new year and all, I thought I’d launch the 2011 newsletter by sharing predictions from a variety of network and systems management vendor executives.  (read more…)

Preliminary findings of TRAC’s end-user survey show that organizations are still struggling to gain full visibility into their IT services and infrastructure. (read more …)

Are you leading your organizations cloud roll-out or are you reacting to it? It is happening, better to lead than follow!

The WorkloadIQ post and the article Richard references on the Stealth Cloud from a CIO article reminds me of a previous artilce about the Accidental Cloud Leader from a Networkworld article. Both of these articles point to the cloud is coming, the choice facing IT organizations is whether to lead, control costs, mitigate risk, deliver quality service and manage costs or to follow with rising costs, reactive IT, high risk and poor service quality. Richard hits the nail on the head, IT is traditionally change averse and insecure with the concept of outsourcing services. Technology is evolving faster and faster and the very organization that should adopt, deploy and lead with technology continues to lag.

In almost all cases when it comes to sourcing decisions they are done to create change that an organization has difficulty bringing to the organization, not for cost reasons. Commodity functions are best suited for outsourcing, driving standards and managing costs. However, outsourcing the service does not remove accountability for managing service delivery.

Cloud providers are popping up faster than service providers duiring the dotcom boom days of web hosting, application hosting, etc. There are several key factors to consider as pointed out in these articles and blog posts:

* Availability of service
* Risk of a secure service
* Reliability of the service provider
* Cost of support

Availability of Service and Reliability of the service provider

The dotcom bust of service providers in the early 2000 era came down to lack of mature management processes. Many providers today are one significant outage away from being out of business. Is this who you trust your services to? Who’s managing and leading this due diligence in contracting for the services in the leader / follower scenario?

When seeking service providers, it is important to understand their management processes and capabilities. You do not want to define them, but the lack of management transparency and process indicates maturity of the service provider and their ability to delivery availbility of services. One thing to note here is not to ask for inappropriate service levels and/or penalties. Investigate their typical services, leverage the cloud and service providers for the commodity and take advantage of the economies of scale they offer.

Risk of a secure service

Security as an obstacle in going to the cloud or leveraging an as-a-service provider is, quite frankly, IT noise. As described in these articles and blogs, this is the service providers business and they know it is their number one objection. In many cases, they may offer a far more secure environment than most IT organizations and thus the rise of IT insecurity and noise. However, again, it is an area that must be investigated as it relates to the mature management practices of a service provider.

Cost of support

Organizations are expressing frustration with their IT organizations as a perceived obstacle to agility and innovation when they go to the cloud directly. As Richard’s blog points out, this costs your IT organization more in the long run to support, the service will go down, the business will call support for help, the provider most likely may not be reliable and in the worst case, data and security can be breached.

Management generally lags new technology and this cycle to go to the service providers directly for a defined service and defined cost is more appealing to the business. Management lags both with IT internally and with the service providers compounding the risk of an outage or security breach.

Novell Operations Center (a WorkloadIQ solution) provides the ability to monitor, manage and measure technology services both internally as well as the performance and availability of the service provider insuring quality service delivery. Service enabling your infrastructure could not be easier today and would provide the control with agility your organization is screaming for from your IT organization. Management does not have to be an afterthought and the right platform can future-proof your services with technology adoption agility!

Check out these articles and then answer: Are you following or leading your organizations cloud rollout because it is happening and coming . . . Are you Stealth or Leading? What are your challenges and concerns?