Digital Transformation Asset Management

Convergence: The Catalyst to Transform Scientific Research

By G C Network | January 7, 2015

by Melvin Greer  Greer Institute for Leadership and Innovation A new transformative research approach is gaining global attention and adoption. The scientific opportunities enabled by convergence—the coming together of insights…

Cloud Computing Promises: Fact or Fiction

By G C Network | December 29, 2014

Cloud computing is currently making information technology headlines, and vendors are aggressively promoting the many benefits it can provide organizations. This White Paper addresses the claims and questions that are…

Super Smart Person’s Guide to Cloud Computing – San Diego

By G C Network | December 24, 2014

We are offering a fun and educational event just about the cloud. This session will help CEOs, Directors, Managers, and Dilberts learn what the heck the cloud is all about.…

A Managed Services Business Owners Lament: A talk with Joe D.

By G C Network | December 22, 2014

 by Kevin L. Jackson A few days ago I received a call from a small business owner asking if I would meet him for coffee.  He wanted to run some…

Technology and the Evolving Workforce

By G C Network | December 17, 2014

by Melvin Greer Managing Director Greer Institute for Leadership and Innovation According to a Greer Institute Workforce and Talent study, the 2020 workforce is both “the most educated and culturally…

Security attacks and countermeasures

By G C Network | December 14, 2014

by Sandra K. Johnson   Cyber security is rapidly becoming a significant issue in the C-suite as well as the population at large. The results of Dell’s Global Technology Adoption…

ITIL in 7 Minutes!

By G C Network | December 9, 2014

What is ITIL & how can it benefit your organization? Learn the answers to these questions plus gain an understanding of the ITIL Service Lifecycle in this video.  Download a…

How Resilient are FedRAMP Clouds Anyway?

By G C Network | December 8, 2014

By Jodi Kohut For the uninitiated, FedRAMP is the Federal Risk Authorizationand Management Program, a government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for…

Federal Tech Talk: Cloud Transition Challenges in Government and Industry

By G C Network | December 2, 2014

Cloud Computing is revolutionizing today’s business marketplace. While “learning the art of the possible”, corporate executives today are struggling with the business and security challenges associate with this important transition. Just…

Cloud, Mobile, Social and Cyber: 2015 Predictions That Will Rock The World (AGAIN!)

By G C Network | December 1, 2014

2015 PREDICTION TIME!! The worlds of cloud, mobile, social and cyber will continue expanding, permuting and recombining. Their individual effect on society and commerce will become moot as these technological…

Today’s businesses run in the virtual world. From virtual machines to chatbots to Bitcoin, physical has become last century’s modus operandi.  Dealing with this type of change in business even has its own buzzword – Digital Transformation.  From an information technology operations point of view, this has been manifested by organizations increasingly placing applications, virtual servers, storage platforms, networks, managed services and other assets in multiple cloud environments.  Managing these virtual assets can be much more challenging than it was with traditional physical assets in your data center.  Cost management and control are also vastly different than the physical asset equivalent.  Challenges abound around tracking and evaluating cloud investments, managing their costs and increasing their efficiency.  Managers need to track cloud spending and usage, compare costs with budgets and obtain actionable insights that help set appropriate governance policies.

The cloud computing operational expenditure (OPEX) model demands a holistic management approach capable of monitoring and taking action across a heterogeneous environment.  This situation is bound to contain cloud services from multiple vendors and managed service providers.  Enterprises also need to manage services from a consumption point of view. This viewpoint looks at the service from the particular application down to the specific IT service resources involved, such as storage or a database. Key goals enterprises need to strive for to be successful in this new model include:

 

  • Obtaining ongoing visibility into true-life cloud inventory;
  • Viewing current and projected costs versus industry benchmarks;
  • Establishing and enforcing governance control points using financial and technical policies;
  • Receiving and proactively responding to cloud cost and operational variances and deviations;
  • Gaining operational advantages through advanced analytics and cognitive computing capabilities;
  • Simulating changes to inventory, spend goals and operational priorities before committing;
  • Managing policies through asset tagging across providers and provider services; and
  • Identifying and notifying senior managers about waste and opportunities for cost savings.

Accomplishing these goals across a hybrid IT environment will also require timely, accurate and consistent information delivery to the organizations, CIO, CFO, IT Financial Controller and IT Infrastructure and Operations Managers.  Ideally, this information would be delivered via a “single pane of glass” dashboard.

One path towards gaining these capabilities would be through the use of a cloud services brokerage
platform like IBM® Cloud Brokerage Managed Services – Cost and Asset Management. This “plug and play” service can assist in the management of spending and assets across hybrid clouds by visualizing data that provides focus on asset performance.  Through the use of predictive analytics, it can also provide insight-based recommendations that help in the prioritization of changes according to their expected level of impact.  Analytics enables an ability to recalibrate cost by comparing planned versus actual operational expenditures.  The built-in cloud service provider catalog, pricing, and matching engines can also help organizations find alternative providers more easily.  Using IBM Watson® cognitive capabilities, IBM Cloud Brokerage Managed Services – Cost and Asset Management will also highlight cloud best practices and expected results based on IBM’s rich knowledge base of cross-industry cloud transition experience.

Operating a business from a virtual IT platform is different.  That is why advanced cost and asset management skills, capabilities and tools are needed.  According to Gartner, more than US$1 trillion in IT spending will be directly or indirectly affected by the shift to cloud during the next five years. This makes cloud computing one of the most disruptive forces of IT spending since the early days of the digital age.  You and your organization can be ready for these tectonic changes by implementing the straightforward five-step process supported by IBM Cloud Service Brokerage capabilities:

 

  1. Establish governance thresholds and policies for services;
  2. Connect the advanced management platform across all cloud service accounts;
  3. Track the costs of the services, including recurring and usage-based costs;
  4. Enforce compliance on the costs and asset usage using the purpose-built cost analytics engines; and
  5. Simulate and optimize the control and compliance actions and better control your costs.

 

This post was brought to you by IBM Global Technology Services. For more content like this, visit IT Biz Advisor

( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article, get free updates by email or RSS – © Copyright Kevin L. Jackson 2016)

Follow me at https://Twitter.com/Kevin_Jackson
Posted in

G C Network