EMC Forum Toronto: IT as a Service (ITaaS)

Paul O’Doherty, Cloud Solution Manager

The advent of Cloud computing has created pressure on internal IT departments to act more like service providers.

 

Like a service provider, IT must deliver improve business agility and more direct value to the business top-line while maintaining security, trust and control.  At the same time the IT group must figure our how to simplify the consumption of technology services by the business.

This requires changes to how service is delivered; allowing more self-service and greater end user choice on compute devices.  It requires the IT group to focus on delivering services vs. silos of technology.

IT must consider more hybrid models of private and public cloud.  A hybrid model enables the IT group to deliver the services they are extremely good at and federate others.  Studies have shown that a Hybrid Cloud model provides the absolute lowest total cost for delivering IT compared to any other model – including public cloud.

In order to transform there are three primary models that the IT team must adopt:

• The Technology model: integrating Hybrid Cloud using converged infrastructure.  Converged infrastructure enforces consistent standards and predictable IT and utilization costs.
• The Consumption model: deliver service catalogs vs. delivering a collection of virtual machines to accelerate deployment of new services. 
• The Operations model: A new set of skills will be required in Cloud and datacenter architecture.  In addition a change in traditional Project Management to Product Management.  This will enable the IT team to deliver products that improve business competitiveness and agility.

Adopting these models will take time, however the benefit is that operational costs are reduced. In addition, deployment times are accelerated and the amount of IT capital available for delivering new capabilities and services increases in an ITaaS model.  To see the complete presentation click here