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Driving Business Service Management with Private Cloud

Private cloud might be one of the best things to ever happen to Business Service Management. Private cloud inherently requires the company to be more focused on the needs of the business side of the organization, which leads directly to aligning IT performance with the business needs. Because of this, the move to private cloud is driving Business Service Management in many organizations.

Private cloud refers to enterprises turning their own internal IT into a cloud – not just a shared resource provided by virtualization but also metered usage, a standardized service catalog, and a self-service portal. So private cloud is really about defining that interface between IT and the business. With private cloud, the business can interact with IT in a more transparent way.

Business Service Management and private cloud are inextricably linked. In order to offer IT as a service to the business, you cannot simply build the foundation of a private cloud. Defining the service catalog template, exposing those services to business, allowing them to choose appropriate service levels, and monitor and manage them to ensure they are meeting service-level targets – those are all critical functions of a private cloud, and they force you to think in terms of business services.

By requiring the process of developing a service catalog and developing standardized business services, private cloud forces you to justify why you have these components in your service catalog. You need to meter private cloud usage because you need to be able to charge people for what they use. So you need to assign a cost to those business services, and that cost must have a business justification associated with it. Consequently, private cloud helps you justify why you operate certain services in IT, and this helps IT align itself to the business – making sure the services are bringing value to the business, not created just for creations sake.

There has been a hump to get over with virtualization. We have seen companies that have virtualized 20-30% of their workloads and then stopped. It is not because they decided not to go further, it is because they have done the easy 20-30%, the non-mission critical applications. Now they are struggling to virtualize the mission-critical applications that they run their businesses on. And that has been a huge challenge, because virtualization itself doesn't get the job done. You need end-to-end Business Service Management to monitor, manage and control those applications.

You need strong monitoring in the cloud, strong measurement and strong SLAs, otherwise the business responsible for running that mission-critical application will never allow it to be virtualized. Private cloud is adding all of those extra IT service management capabilities that are necessary to make it viable to put mission-critical applications in the cloud.

About Benjamin Grubin

Benjamin Grubin is the Director of Data Center Management at Novell, responsible for the strategic direction and product portfolio that addresses data center infrastructure, cloud computing, and intelligent workload management worldwide. During the past 15 years he has served in a number of roles including engineering, consulting, and marketing.

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Driving Business Service Management with Private Cloud

Private cloud might be one of the best things to ever happen to Business Service Management. Private cloud inherently requires the company to be more focused on the needs of the business side of the organization, which leads directly to aligning IT performance with the business needs. Because of this, the move to private cloud is driving Business Service Management in many organizations.

Private cloud refers to enterprises turning their own internal IT into a cloud – not just a shared resource provided by virtualization but also metered usage, a standardized service catalog, and a self-service portal. So private cloud is really about defining that interface between IT and the business. With private cloud, the business can interact with IT in a more transparent way.

Business Service Management and private cloud are inextricably linked. In order to offer IT as a service to the business, you cannot simply build the foundation of a private cloud. Defining the service catalog template, exposing those services to business, allowing them to choose appropriate service levels, and monitor and manage them to ensure they are meeting service-level targets – those are all critical functions of a private cloud, and they force you to think in terms of business services.

By requiring the process of developing a service catalog and developing standardized business services, private cloud forces you to justify why you have these components in your service catalog. You need to meter private cloud usage because you need to be able to charge people for what they use. So you need to assign a cost to those business services, and that cost must have a business justification associated with it. Consequently, private cloud helps you justify why you operate certain services in IT, and this helps IT align itself to the business – making sure the services are bringing value to the business, not created just for creations sake.

There has been a hump to get over with virtualization. We have seen companies that have virtualized 20-30% of their workloads and then stopped. It is not because they decided not to go further, it is because they have done the easy 20-30%, the non-mission critical applications. Now they are struggling to virtualize the mission-critical applications that they run their businesses on. And that has been a huge challenge, because virtualization itself doesn't get the job done. You need end-to-end Business Service Management to monitor, manage and control those applications.

You need strong monitoring in the cloud, strong measurement and strong SLAs, otherwise the business responsible for running that mission-critical application will never allow it to be virtualized. Private cloud is adding all of those extra IT service management capabilities that are necessary to make it viable to put mission-critical applications in the cloud.

About Benjamin Grubin

Benjamin Grubin is the Director of Data Center Management at Novell, responsible for the strategic direction and product portfolio that addresses data center infrastructure, cloud computing, and intelligent workload management worldwide. During the past 15 years he has served in a number of roles including engineering, consulting, and marketing.

Hot Topics

The Latest

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...

In March, New Relic published the State of Observability for Media and Entertainment Report to share insights, data, and analysis into the adoption and business value of observability across the media and entertainment industry. Here are six key takeaways from the report ...

Regardless of their scale, business decisions often take time, effort, and a lot of back-and-forth discussion to reach any sort of actionable conclusion ... Any means of streamlining this process and getting from complex problems to optimal solutions more efficiently and reliably is key. How can organizations optimize their decision-making to save time and reduce excess effort from those involved? ...