Twitter Feed
NPR on Cloud Computing
You know it’s important when NPR covers it !! On the “All Things Consider” radio show, NPR took a look into cloud computing. I’m not sure if Computing In The…
Sun Federal Cloud Computing eBook
Sun Federal now has it’s ebook on cloud computing available for all. The website doesn’t really offer any new information, but it does highlight how Sun Federal is targeting the…
Amazon Elastic Block Store
Last week, with their announcement of Elastic Block Store, Amazon has made enterprise class storage in the cloud a reality. According to Dion Hinchcliffe of Ziff Davis,”Elastic Block Store finally…
HP CTO On the Future
In a recent Web Guild article, Shane Robinson, Chief Strategy & Technology Office for HP outilined his belief that we are in the early stages of a major shift. As…
Google serves as first line of defense during Russia’s invasion of Georgia (A plug for the cloud)
As reported by the Christian Science Monitor, “As Georgian troops retreated to defend their capital from Russian attack, the websites of their government, also under fire, retreated to Google. In…
Apptis and Servervault announce Fedcloud
On August 18th, Apptis announced a partnership with ServerVault to offer a trusted cloud computing environment to federal agencies. Called Fedcloud they are offering a federally compliant, on-demand infrastructure that…
SOA-R Educational Series Schedule Changes
Since launching the SOA-R series back in July, cloud computing has become a hot topic among national security professionals. Evidence of this high level of interest is obvious from the…
Comments from Mr. Robert Carey, DON CIO and Army COS General George W. Casey, Jr
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had the distinct pleasure to listen to both Mr. Robert Carey, CIO, Department of the Navy, and General George W. Casey, Jr., Chief…
Akamai at SOA-R Session
Had another very enlightening SOA-R session last week. Of particular note to me was Akamai’s vision of cloud computing. As presented by Fran Trently, Sr. Director Public Sector, Akamai is…
Six Benefits of Cloud Computing
A Public CIO magazine article, to be published later this fall, will highlight six main benefits of cloud computing. Reduced Cost Increased Storage Highly Automated Flexibility More Mobility Allows IT…
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