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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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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

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

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...