Reap ITaaS Benefits

The following excerpts, from “Don’t Get Stuck on Your Virtualization Journey: Where to Focus Next”, are to understand the ways to reap benefits from ITaaS:

 

Based on a collection of research from businesses that have reached the ITaaS phase of the virtualization journey, the following best practices emerge:

•  Secure executive approval and funding for the IT-as-a-Service or cloud computing journey and transformation.
• Develop a roadmap or strategy that covers: hardware, network, storage infrastructure, virtualization technology, and management of those moving pieces, as well as an outline of the service offerings for end users.
• Shift IT’s focus from managing technology tasks to delivering services that align with business needs; service-centric IT organizations take the time to start first with the business requirements and the end-user point of view.
• Reinvent your IT organization and processes to align with the technological changes of virtualization and cloud computing. 
• Replace manual IT processes with automated ones; starting with a “managed virtualization” platform early can relieve the pain of integrating automation technologies later.
• Create a self-service catalogue of IT services for users and lines of business.

• Give IT management control over third-party cloud service providers along with internal IT services.

Virtulization Phases

Read a rather interesting and valuable piece “Don’t Get Stuck on Your Virtualization Journey: Where to Focus Next”

 

The following excerpts, from the above, provide a valuable insight:

 A typical virtualization journey consists of three distinct phases:

• Phase I: IT Production. Virtualization is used primarily for server consolidation of IT-owned applications.
• Phase II : Business Production. Businesses begin using virtualization for business-critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Oracle, or SAP, and deploy more advanced virtualization automation and management features.
• Phase III: IT as a Service (ITaaS). All applications are eligible to run in virtual machines (VMs), advanced techniques are used to manage and monitor virtual servers, and IT organization and processes are updated to run efficiently within virtual infrastructure.

Points for successful Cloud adoption

A large number of cloud deployments seem to fail because it was not strategized properly, and was not done keeping the interests of both IT and Business. The following points seem to be popular and successful in the cloud adoption and integrating it with needs of the IT and business:

•  Identify your target audience
• Understand the customer’s requirements
• Understand the Cloud and choose Cloud solutions accordingly as per your need and requirements of your customers.
• Define your offerings
• Update your processes as per the Cloud requirements & offerings
• Never forget to create a dedicated Cloud team