Cloud Computing: Only Works as Well as Your Organization Manages It

By: Kevin Smilie, Partner, CIO Services

Cloud computing is changing the way IT leaders deliver IT services and value to their customers. As companies learn about the value of the cloud through pilot projects, they gain insight into the technology, its commercial benefits, and see firsthand the changes that must be made to fully take advantage of the cloud. I recently wrote an article on this topic for the Cloud Computing Journal  outlining the ways to maximize the benefits of cloud computing.

In my view, the key to achieving these benefits is with an integrated, centralized IT Service Management (ITSM) system dedicated to demand management, capacity management, and service integration – service management functions that are typically less important to organizations than the simpler service desk and incident management tasks.

As cloud computing continues to change how IT services are delivered, it will be increasingly important to emphasize the need for strong service management and governance frameworks.

Comments

[CloudNinja]

There is alot of thrashing in this space and it is hard to determine which Cloud to goto as everyone is doing something a little different – its hard to compare Cloud 2 Cloud. A similar diagnosis is by David Chappell:
"If I ruled the world”, says David Chappell, “I would make the phrase ‘private cloud’ illegal”. In conversation with David Gristwood, David Chappell, during his recent world tour, discusses the Cloud, its importance and role in the partner ecosystem, and cloud players, such as Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com, VMware and more. You can see his Cloud2Cloud comparison in brief here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7NHQdh8_uo

A more recent talk with David Chappell on this topic where he covers others issues such as:
- IaaS vs PaaS
- Private vs Public Cloud
- Applications that are not a great fit for the Cloud and those which are.
- The threat of Public Cloud to IT departments
see: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/David+Gristwood/Conversations-with-David-Chappell-about-Windows-Azure-and-Cloud-Computing/

thoughts?

hope that helps,
-cn

[Raghu_sub]

Kevin, your blog implies an important observation - ITSM’s broadening of scope to include cloud-management. CA’s acquisition of 3Tera is a clear give-away of this convergence http://www.ca.com/us/press/release.aspx?cid=229531.

Although cloud-management doesn’t have to solve all the problems that ITSM does (cloud’s self-healing for instance can accomplish some of ITSM functions in a lot more efficient manner http://fountnhead.blogspot.com/2008/11/itil-itsm-and-cloud.html ), it still needs to be integrated into an organization’s ITSM framework to honor ITSM’s core tenet of simplifying the management of IT.

I’m sure we’re in for a lot of acquisition/engineering activities in this space.

- Raghavan Subramanian