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.
The Latest
The OpenTelemetry End-User SIG surveyed more than 100 OpenTelemetry users to learn more about their observability journeys and what resources deliver the most value when establishing an observability practice ... Regardless of experience level, there's a clear need for more support and continued education ...
A silo is, by definition, an isolated component of an organization that doesn't interact with those around it in any meaningful way. This is the antithesis of collaboration, but its effects are even more insidious than the shutting down of effective conversation ...
New Relic's 2024 State of Observability for Industrials, Materials, and Manufacturing report outlines the adoption and business value of observability for the industrials, materials, and manufacturing industries ... Here are 8 key takeaways from the report ...
For mission-critical applications, it's often easy to justify an investment in a solution designed to ensure that the application is available no less than 99.99% of the time — easy because the cost to the organization of that app being offline would quickly surpass the cost of a high availability (HA) solution ... But not every application warrants the investment in an HA solution with redundant infrastructure spanning multiple data centers or cloud availability zones ...
The edge brings computing resources and data storage closer to end users, which explains the rapid boom in edge computing, but it also generates a huge amount of data ... 44% of organizations are investing in edge IT to create new customer experiences and improve engagement. To achieve those goals, edge services observability should be a centerpoint of that investment ...
The growing adoption of efficiency-boosting technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) helps counteract staffing shortages, rising labor costs, and talent gaps, while giving employees more time to focus on strategic projects. This trend is especially evident in the government contracting sector, where, according to Deltek's 2024 Clarity Report, 34% of GovCon leaders rank AI and ML in their top three technology investment priorities for 2024, above perennial focus areas like cybersecurity, data management and integration, business automation and cloud infrastructure ...
While IT leaders are preparing organizations for accelerated generative AI (GenAI) adoption, C-suite executives' confidence in their IT team's ability to deliver basic services is declining, according to a study conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value ...
The consequences of outages have become a pressing issue as the largest IT outage in history continues to rock the world with severe ramifications ... According to the Catchpoint Internet Resilience Report, these types of disruptions, internet outages in particular, can have severe financial and reputational impacts and enterprises should strongly consider their resilience ...
Everyday AI and digital employee experience (DEX) are projected to reach mainstream adoption in less than two years according to the Gartner, Inc. Hype Cycle for Digital Workplace Applications, 2024 ...
When an IT issue is not handled correctly, not only is innovation stifled, but stakeholder trust can also be impacted (such as when there's an IT outage or slowdowns in performance). When you add new technology investments and innovations into the mix, you have a recipe for disaster ...
