Digital Transformation Asset Management

NJVC to Spotlight Cloudcuity at Gartner Data Center Conference

By G C Network | November 15, 2012

Las Vegas., Nov. 15, 2012 — NJVC, an information technology solutions provider headquartered in Northern Virginia, announces it will spotlight its Cloudcuity™ framework for delivering secure and unified cloud management…

NJVC Cloud Expert Kevin L. Jackson Launches Second Book: GovCloud II: Implementation and Cloud Brokerage Services

By G C Network | November 9, 2012

VIENNA, Va., Nov. 8, 2012—NJVC, an information technology (IT) solutions provider headquartered in northern Virginia, is pleased to announce that Kevin L. Jackson, vice president and general manager, cloud services,…

Virtustream a Visionary in Gartner 2012 IaaS Magic Quadrant

By G C Network | October 27, 2012

Congratulations to NJVC Cloudcuity partner Virtustream for being positioned as a visionary in the Gartner 2012 IaaS Magic Quadrant! Magic Quadrants provide a graphical competitive positioning of four types of…

GovCloud II: Implementation and Cloud Brokerage Services Now Available

By G C Network | October 22, 2012

I’m happy and proud to announce the release of my second book, “GovCloud II: Implementation and Cloud Brokerage Services” by my publisher Government Training Inc.   The public and private…

NJVC® Introduces Cloudcuity™ AppDeployer to Create and Sell Software Applications

By G C Network | October 18, 2012

Developers Can Create, Deploy and Publish Apps in the Cloud for Free Vienna, Va., Oct. 18, 2012 — NJVC®, an information technology (IT) solutions provider headquartered in Northern Virginia, introduces…

NJVC® Announces the Cloudcuity™ Government Marketplace, Powered by Virtustream’s Secure Cloud xChange

By G C Network | October 4, 2012

Vienna, Va., Oct. 4, 2012—NJVC®, an information technology solutions provider headquartered in Northern Virginia, and Virtustream, Inc., a leading enterprise cloud software company, today announced a new alliance to provide…

Cloudcuity™: Thought Leadership Translated to Operational Excellence

By G C Network | September 26, 2012

As my long time readers have certainly noticed, the frequency of my posts have lengthened over the past few months. First, I would like to offer my apologies for being…

NJVC® Unveils Cloudcuity™ Umbrella Framework for NJVC Cloud Services

By G C Network | September 13, 2012

Vienna, Va., Sept. 13, 2012 — NJVC®, an information technology (IT) solutions provider headquartered in Northern Virginia, introduces Cloudcuity™, a new framework for the company’s cloud service offerings to help…

NJVC® Announces SaaS Accelerate: Specialized Infrastructure Hosting and Managed Services Program for Software-as-a-Service Providers

By G C Network | August 25, 2012

VIENNA, Va., Aug. 15, 2012 —NJVC® announces the release of NJVC SaaS Accelerate, a specialized infrastructure hosting and managed services offering designed to support the business needs of software-as-a-service (SaaS)…

Texas Cloud Computing Lessons Learned

By G C Network | August 12, 2012

Late last week  the Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) released an important whitepaper that reviewed it’s multi-year Pilot Texas Cloud Offering (PTCO). This project was designed to allow a…

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.

 

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