Business Service Management can provide a single pane of glass across any environment:  public/private cloud, virtual and physical – How important will this be as we move to the cloud?

I heard a great quote a couple of months ago: “Every company in the IT industry with revenue of less than $100m is currently changing their strategy to focus on the cloud.” If you combine that assertion with the fact that every company in the IT industry with revenues over $1 billion is modifying their strategy to make it “cloud-enabled” or “cloud-ready”, it becomes difficult to support the naysayers who are claiming that the cloud is just a fad. It’s here to stay whether or not you want to accept it.

So the question for this audience becomes “What does that mean for Business Service Management?” From my experience with a very large service provider who is aggressively moving into the public/private cloud space for their internal operations as well as their external customers, Business Service Management becomes a necessity instead of a nice to have. Adoption of the cloud exacerbates the technical challenges that spawned the BSM industry in the first place: namely IT heterogeneity, physically/geographically dispersed data centers and the need for IT organizations to provide higher levels of service at lower costs. At the most simple level, the ability to co-locate two virtual machines on one physical server cuts costs in half. However, this cost savings brings along complexities in terms of resource sharing, how the virtual machines got provisioned to the box, how they are being independently and jointly monitored and how they will be managed moving forward. Additionally, cloud adoption may very well increase the number of systems management tools that an IT organization needs to deploy, manage and monitor.

The ability to provide IT operations and management a single pane of glass view into all of these complexities, focused on the most critical business services, becomes necessary to ensure that the costs of these complexities do not overcome the costs savings enjoyed through virtualization.

How are you measuring your services in the cloud?

Kevin