Digital Transformation Asset Management

“Cash for Clunkers” Should Have Used the Cloud!

By G C Network | August 24, 2009

Rich Bruklis wrote an excellent essy on how the government missed a perfect opportunity to use cloud computing. In “Cloud Opportunity Missed” he writes: “It appears that the voucher system…

US Navy Experiments With Secure Cloud Computing

By G C Network | August 20, 2009

This week in San Diego, CA the US Navy held the initial planning conference for Trident Warrior ’10. The Trident Warrior series is the premier annual FORCEnet Sea Trial Event…

GSA To Present On Cloud Initiative at NCOIC Plenary

By G C Network | August 13, 2009

A General Services Administration (GSA) representative is now scheduled to provide a briefing on the agency’s cloud computing initiative during a “Best Practices for Cloud Initiatives using Storefronts” session on…

FAA CIO Focuses on Cybersecurity

By G C Network | August 12, 2009

During this week Federal Executive Forum, FAA CIO Dave Bowen mentioned protection against software vulnerabilities, wireless intrusion and website vulnerabilities as his top cybersecurity priorities. As the Assistant Administrator for…

DHS Asst. Secretary Addresses Cybersecurity Priorities

By G C Network | August 11, 2009

Greg Schaffer, Assistant Secretary for CyberSecurity & Communications for the US Department of Homeland Security, sees Trusted Internet Connections, EINSTEIN, and front line defense of the nation’s networks as top…

US DoD Chief Security Officer on Cybersecurity Priorities

By G C Network | August 10, 2009

In a Federal Executive Forum interview, Robert Lentz, Chief Security Officer for the US Department of Defense, highlighted the departments cybersecurity priorities. Mr. Lentz is the Deputy Assistant Secretary of…

Twitter Under Denial of Service Attack

By G C Network | August 6, 2009

Multiple sources are reporting that Twitter continues to be under a denial of service attack. Some are speculating that this represents the power of a coordinated bot network attack. For…

NCOIC Holding Full Day Cloud Computing Session

By G C Network | August 5, 2009

The Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) will be holding a one-day cloud computing session during its plenary meetings, 21-25 September at the Fair Lakes Hyatt in Fairfax, VA. A…

Sevatec a New Player in the Federal Cloud Computing Market

By G C Network | August 3, 2009

Just in time for the new Federal Cloud Computing Storefront, Sevatec, Inc. is announcing the development of a toolkit to help federal agencies transform their enterprise architectures to cloud computing…

GSA Releases Cloud Computing RFQ

By G C Network | July 31, 2009

Following through on a much anticipated action, GSA released their Cloud Computing Request For Quotation (RFQ) today. Cloud computing is a major part of President Obama’s reform effort and this…

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