ITAAS The Change you need.
For years, the promise of running IT departments like an internal service provider in an IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) model has been elusive. Frameworks such as ITIL have provided an impetus for this service mentality, but with an emphasis on IT operations and less focus on infrastructure and application development. The result was still a siloed IT environment held together by heroic efforts. The majority of IT spending is dedicated to “keep the lights on” activities, hindering IT’s ability to keep up with the pace of business innovation. Enter virtualization and cloud computing: essential building blocks for the agility, flexibility, and “services” focus that IT needs to deliver to the business. These advances couldn’t have come at a better time. The current business environment dictates that IT needs to respond to the business faster than ever before. This goes beyond being able to simply provide a new server; it is about the end-to-end IT services—spanning applications, infrastructure, and operations—that help the business improve its competitiveness and capture new revenue. Organizations strive to be able to instantly respond to change or dramatically improve a specific business process. This is not lost on IT—in fact, many organizations are beginning to change their investment justifications to ensure that any new technology purchase or operational initiative is geared toward business process improvement, a primary justification for new IT expenditures over the past few years. Clearly, IT is changing focus, moving away from cost optimization drivers fueled by macroeconomic woes. But focus on improving business processes is only part of the equation. IT departments are also looking to transform their operating models and infrastructure into environments previously seen in cloud computing providers and other external service providers.
The ITaaS approach requires a transformation, and the IT organization requires solutions that will help enable it. This includes deploying highly automated virtualization technologies, coupled with a private cloud framework, to provide on-demand computing resources in a shared, self-service model with a catalog of standardized service options. If the organization chooses to broker external services, then it will require policy-based controls and orchestration to manage this combination of internal (private cloud) and external services (public cloud). Critical to the success of this blend of approaches is maintaining clarity and uniformity in how users interact with IT and, in particular, how both IT and the business can gain access to resources across what would be a mix of providers.
Often underestimated aspects of success in major transitions are skills and behavioral change. Recent research data points both to a problematic shortage of skilled resources to build virtual environments that will serve as the underpinnings of cloud, and also to a lack of internal skills as an inhibitor to fully achieving the benefits of virtualization and cloud. Cloud computing is as much about the operational model as it is about the technology. This requires expertise in areas such as resource pooling, metered usage, and self-service provisioning.
In addition to skills, organizations often ignore the changes needed in behavior. This includes the siloed nature of IT organizations, which makes it difficult to implement and take advantage of shared pools of resources in a pay-per- use model, as well as how business users, application developers, and IT architects are accustomed to requesting à la carte IT resources as one-off requests. Solutions that provide IT and the business with a “menu” of standard service options and a clear understanding of the trade-offs around unit cost and time to provisioning for “off the menu” choices will help facilitate the behavioral changes that need to take place. Ultimately, these tools must put the choice in the hands of the IT consumer so they can make informed decisions while providing the right governance and control to ensure that those choices comply with operational and security policies.
Organizations cannot make this transformation happen without help. Vendors need to step up and not only deliver the technology and infrastructure, but also assist with the frameworks, software, and process changes that will be required to adjust the fundamental behavior of the IT organization.
IT-as-a-Service
Why are so many organizations interested in delivering ITaaS? If implemented correctly, it can deliver numerous capabilities which will ultimately translate to business benefits. Some of those capabilities include:
Speed and agility
IT’s ability to respond more quickly translates into faster provisioning of services that fuel the business. By driving innovation and differentiation in today’s always-on business environment, IT can create a sustainable competitive advantage and go way beyond being “just” a cost center, which is how the static and inflexible legacy environments in so many data centers today are often perceived.
Leveraging virtualization to enable cloud computing
The ITaaS model implies the adoption of cloud computing and requires a number of changes. Typically the first change is related to technology—more specifically, to server virtualization. In fact, ’s annual IT spending survey indicated that “increased use of server virtualization” was the number one IT priority for the last two years. To further underscore the relationship between server virtualization and cloud computing, a prior survey of current server virtualization users revealed that building a private cloud registered among the top five IT priorities for these organizations. Cloud computing is much more than virtualization; however, in most cases, maturity in server virtualization is a precursor to private cloud adoption.
Unified, converged infrastructures
Cloud computing is also a new consumption model, which has an impact on how those environments are built. The new building blocks for the cloud are not just individual VMs, physical servers, networks, or storage equipment, but rather a new unit of tightly integrated and converged infrastructures. These new converged platforms are delivered either as a complete solution or in the form of a reference architecture that can be used to build out private cloud environments. This IaaS layer is the foundation for use cases ranging from application test/dev to virtual desktops. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that many service providers have already adopted this architecture to deliver enterprise class cloud services as well.
Scalability.
In a highly dynamic environment, IT needs to rapidly scale. This is especially true for virtualized deployments. Indeed, research indicates that virtual environments will be scaling up rapidly over the next two years, with the majority of organizations reporting significant growth in both the number of virtualized servers and the number of virtualized servers running in production environments. The latter is much more important as the production environment requires much higher levels of availability and protection. It should be noted, however, that the ability to scale does not only refer to long term growth. It also refers to the ability to burst applications for short timeframes. This could include extra capacity for end of month/end of the quarter processes or to handle a special promotion from marketing. In a hybrid cloud model, this implies a “build the base, rent the spike” approach. Scale also includes more than one dimension: in addition to scaling up, organizations also need to scale back down and return resources to a general pool for better optimization. This implies that a lifecycle approach is required, whether for shutting down public cloud instances or re-purposing unused virtual machines in a private cloud.
Simplification
This is critical for the initial and long-term success of any ITaaS project. The key is to have an easy to use and intuitive self-service portal interface for both IT and business users. This is certainly no easy task—the portal is abstracting all the complexity of the highly virtualized and rapidly changing infrastructure of the data center. The user, however, may not care about that. All the user knows is that they need a service to meet their needs—how many VMs and how much storage is required may be irrelevant. This is true across the board, whether it is a revenue- generating mission critical application or test/dev environment for QA. However, in this case, the environments should be vastly different in terms of availability and data protection. This will also translate into different costs to deliver the services, which must be clearly understood through the portal so the business can make informed and intelligent decisions. While simplicity is preferred for less technical users, the portal should also allow advanced IT users to have the option to view infrastructure details based on their role.
Automation
With highly dynamic environments, rapid change can be accommodated by individual acts of heroism from the IT staff for a limited time, but it is not sustainable. The key to enabling long term repeatable success shouldn’t be based solely on the quality of the IT staff and their skill sets, but rather on policy-based automation and orchestration of manual repetitive tasks. This will allow the best and brightest on the IT staff to formalize best practices that will mitigate risk and enable more effective governance and control. It will also free staff to work on more strategic initiatives and help drive even more efficiencies for the business.
Required Building Blocks for the Cloud Computing Era
In order to meet the needs of the business, new operating models and architectures are being developed—ones that more closely resemble a service provider environment than in an enterprise. While the infrastructure plays a critical role, this transformation also requires new tools to help re-architect existing processes and automate or orchestrate previously manually-intensive operations. So while the new technology and infrastructure will be important building blocks, there are other required building blocks to enable a cloud service. They include:
Service catalogs
A big part of developing a new operating model for cloud computing is establishing a means of standardization. A catalog of standard offerings is critical as it reduces complexity and eliminates time wasted by provisioning highly varied requests. Standardization of services is essential for on-demand provisioning: a well-defined set of standard service options results in greater benefits through automation and more cost-effective service delivery.
Self-service portals
In order to deliver the agility and speed required in today’s fast-paced environment, organizations will also need to make self-service provisioning an essential component. This will require the creation of an easy to use portal with policy-based controls and governance. Keep in mind that the portal will be the main interface for both business and IT users to procure services regardless of their role and where they are located. This will be the face of the IT service broker.
Process automation and orchestration
The service catalog and portal definitely increase flexibility and efficiency in the ordering of services; however, IT needs to be able to deliver those services almost as quickly as they were ordered. On the back end of the service catalog, organizations need ties into orchestration and automation engines to eliminate time-consuming and error-prone manual provisioning processes. This should also include the concept of lifecycle management for the ongoing maintenance and decommissioning of services.
Highly virtualized, converged infrastructures
As previously mentioned, prepackaged (or containerized) environments, purpose-built, for the cloud are becoming the new units of compute. This consists of tightly integrated physical servers (typically blades), high performance networks, and enterprise-class storage designed for virtualization and built to handle scalable, dynamic environments. Ideally, these converged infrastructures will be integrated with the other building blocks outlined above and will help to remove the complexity typically associated with large scale IT environments. Because these units are preconfigured and tested—they should deploy faster and without the typical inter-technology domain integration pain points.
The MSP Answer.
While it is hard for current IT departments to make this change, its often easier for companies to simply outsource some, or all, of certain function to a Managed Service Provider. With the MSP model the company often gets expertise, hardware, cloud and support all in one utility, pay-as-you-go bill. While the MSP gains the leverage of the cloud as well as economies of scale with support personnel, and the ability to support more offerings with fewer and fewer engineers.
ITaaS is the future of IT
At this time in history it is starting to make less and less sense for a company that produces widgets, and provides service “X” to also be an expert, and indeed, in the Information Technology business. The time has come when IT should simply “work”, and not require expert staffing, and resources, to provide ongoing benefits to the business. If you would like to know more about the process, or moving to ITaaS please give us a call at :