Twitter Feed
The Time is Now for 21st Century Leadership
I’ve just had the opportunity to preview my good friend Melvin Greer’s newest effort, “21st Century Leadership: Harnessing Innovation, Accelerating Business Success“. Now in pre-release, this book highlights the compelling…
Public Cloud IaaS : A Price/Performance vs. Security Analysis
Industry’s transition from custom made, one-of-a-kind IT infrastructures to the standardize, commodity based cloud paradigm is well on it’s way. IBM’s recent “Under Cloud Cover” study highlights the rapidly of…
Catch the Cloud with DorobekINSIDER LIVE!
Yesterday I thoroughly enjoyed an opportunity to participate in the DorobekINSIDER LIVE edition on cloud computing. The conversation was both lively and informative. Joining me on the show were:…
Cloud Shines Brightly as Future of Disaster Response IT
The call for help began as a rumble. Twenty miles beneath the ocean’s surface, a rupture in a massive tectonic plate ripped a 310 mile-long break in the sea floor,…
NCOIC/NGA Demonstrates Use of Cloud in Disaster Response
When the world’s next major earthquake, tsunami or other disaster hits, military, government and civilian NGA project is available on the NCOIC website. responders will need to manage and…
NBC4 Puts On A Great GovCloud Show !!
NBC 4 in Washington, DC highlighted government cloud computing today as part of their GovInnovate show. Below is just a taste of the informative public service they provided. Go to…
OMB’s Evidence Memo: A Call for Cloud Services Brokerage
by Ray Holloman and Kevin Jackson In a late July memo the Office of Management and Budget requested cloud services brokerage. Well, not in so many words. Rather, OMB requested…
Cloud Services Brokerage Lessons From Alex Rodriguez, Baseball’s Trade Deadline
( A guest post from Ray Holloman, NJVC Corporate Communications) Two stories sat atop baseball’s marquee in the final days of July. The first was the non-waiver trade deadline, baseball’s…
Lessons Learned: VA Cloud Email Termination
According to a Federal Computer Week article by Frank Konkel, The Department of Veterans Affairs terminated its five-year, $36 million cloud computing contract for email and calendaring services with HP…
Deconstructing Cloud: An Excellent Guide to the Cloud Computing World
On an almost daily basis, I’m approach for my views on “cloud computing technology”. Although typically innocent in nature, I always cringe at the thought of enduring yet another hours…
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$1 trillion in IT spending will be directly or indirectly affected by the shift to cloud during the next five years. This makes cloud computing one of the most disruptive forces of IT spending since the early days of the digital age. You and your organization can be ready for these tectonic changes by implementing the straightforward five-step process supported by IBM Cloud Service Brokerage capabilities:
- Establish governance thresholds and policies for services;
- Connect the advanced management platform across all cloud service accounts;
- Track the costs of the services, including recurring and usage-based costs;
- Enforce compliance on the costs and asset usage using the purpose-built cost analytics engines; and
- Simulate and optimize the control and compliance actions and better control your costs.
This post was brought to you by IBM Global Technology Services. For more content like this, visit IT Biz Advisor
( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article, get free updates by email or RSS – © Copyright Kevin L. Jackson 2016)
Cloud Computing
- CPUcoin Expands CPU/GPU Power Sharing with Cudo Ventures Enterprise Network Partnership
- CPUcoin Expands CPU/GPU Power Sharing with Cudo Ventures Enterprise Network Partnership
- Route1 Announces Q2 2019 Financial Results
- CPUcoin Expands CPU/GPU Power Sharing with Cudo Ventures Enterprise Network Partnership
- ChannelAdvisor to Present at the D.A. Davidson 18th Annual Technology Conference
Cybersecurity
- Route1 Announces Q2 2019 Financial Results
- FIRST US BANCSHARES, INC. DECLARES CASH DIVIDEND
- Business Continuity Management Planning Solution Market is Expected to Grow ~ US$ 1.6 Bn by the end of 2029 - PMR
- Atos delivers Quantum-Learning-as-a-Service to Xofia to enable artificial intelligence solutions
- New Ares IoT Botnet discovered on Android OS based Set-Top Boxes