Digital Transformation Asset Management

Ambient Awareness. The cloud killer app?

By G C Network | September 10, 2008

Ambient Awareness: the ability to acquire, process, and act upon application specific contextual information, taking the current user preferences and state of mind into account. In the September 5th New…

The Cloud Wins in Minneapolis at the RNC!

By G C Network | September 9, 2008

Little did I know that while I was watching the Republicans cheer their standard bearer inside the Xcel Energy Center that the cloud infrastructure was outside defeating the forces of…

Cloud Computing vs. Virtualization

By G C Network | September 8, 2008

Yesterday, Reuven Cohen in ElasticVapor, provided an excellent post on the title subject. I’d like to “second his emotion” and, for my audience, add that cloud computing technologies and techniques…

Government Technology Cloud Recommendations

By G C Network | September 5, 2008

Recommendation on the cloud from Government Technology: No. 1: Educate your team about cloud computing. Don’t just ignore this topic as hype – the future is in this direction. Go…

Cloud Computing: A pay-by-consumption scalable service

By G C Network | September 4, 2008

John Edwards (not the Senator) of Computerworld sees cloud computing as a “…pay-by-consumption scalable service that’s usually free of long-term contracts and is typically application- and operating system-independent”. His recent…

Cloud Computing Dictionary

By G C Network | September 4, 2008

Geva Perry will be presenting at the October 8th SOA-R event. Before attending, you may want to visit his cloud computing dictionary to catch up on the current cloud computing…

Google Launches Chrome: Desktop-centric to Network-centric

By G C Network | September 3, 2008

According to Nicholas Carr, “Chrome is the first cloud browser”. If you’re not familiar with Chrome, this application is Google’s entry into the browser wars. In his blog, Mr. Carr…

Boeing Gives Up On Interoperable Modelling and SimulationNnetworks

By G C Network | September 3, 2008

Last week a Flightglobal article reported on the softening of Boeing’s stance on the need to establish standards for networking protocols across the US and global defence industry. Citing the…

Cisco: A Cloud Computing Company?

By G C Network | September 2, 2008

Yes Cisco ! Red Herring’s report on Cisco’s acquisition of PostPath last week presents a strong case for this. If finalized, PostPath would become Cisco’s fifteenth acquisition in less than…

Cloud Computing at top of Hype Cycle

By G C Network | August 29, 2008

Computerworld reports that Gartner see cloud computing as being at the top of the hype cycle. They have also settled on a definition: “a style of computing where massively scalable…

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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