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Animoto = Automated Imagery PED
Over the past two days, I’ve spent quite a bit of time with Stevie Clifton, Co-founder & CTO of Animoto. Besides being one of the coolest things I’ve seen in…
World Summit of Cloud Computing 2008
Video by Animoto using cloud computing technology. (Done in 20 minutes for free)!! Follow me at https://Twitter.com/Kevin_Jackson
2008 World Summit of Cloud Computing
After a uneventful trip , I’m now in Israel for the World Summit. With over 500 people expected to attend, it promises to be an exciting time. Unfortunately, I arrived…
CloudCamp Federal ’08
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NCOIC Cloud Working Group
The NCOIC will be holding a cloud computing working group on December 10th during plenary session in Costa Mesa, CA. The session focus will be “Requirements for Enterprise Cloud Computing”.…
Cloud Computing vs. Cloud Services
In September, Frank Gens provided an excellent overview of the the new “Cloud Computing Era”. In preparing for an upcoming talk, I re-read the post and found myself appreciating it…
Inaugural “Inside the Cloud” Survey
Appistry and CloudCamp recently released results from the first “Inside the Cloud” survey. Key takeaways were: Amazon perceived as cloud leader, with twice as many votes as Google Infrastructure providers…
FIAC Presentation Mentions Cloud Computing
At the recent Federal Information Assurance Conference, Bob Gourley, CTO Crucial Point LLC, and former Defense Intelligence Agency CTO, recently provided his views on the state of Federal IT. His cloud…
Sun Cloud Czar
Earlier this week it was announced that, Sun, Senior Vice President, Dave Douglas, was appointed to lead the Company’s cloud computing efforts. A JDJ Article also stated that, in addition to becoming Sun’s…
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)
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