Digital Transformation Asset Management

The Endpoint Imperative: Global Security Compliance. Are you ready?

By G C Network | November 12, 2017

    China has its Cybersecurity Law. Next May, the General Data Protection Regulation – or GDPR –goes into effect for the European Union. Research shows most organizations just aren’t…

The Endpoint Imperative: IT Spending: Setting Priorities in a Volatile World

By G C Network | November 5, 2017

  Fast-evolving trends are changing the way IT thinks about security. To stay secure and productive, IT operations must excel at the fundamentals: PC refreshes for security, and optimizing end-user…

Top 1000 Tech Bloggers

By G C Network | October 24, 2017

The Rise “Top 1000 Tech Bloggers” leaderboard recognizes the most inspiring Tech journalists and bloggers active on social media. They use Klout scores (50%) and the blogger’s twitter conversations on…

IBM – The Power of Cloud Brokerage

By G C Network | October 14, 2017

Hybrid cloud adoption is now mainstream and you are making decisions every day about how to transform application and infrastructure architectures, service delivery, DevOps, production operations and governance. With Cloud…

More SMB Love Needed

By G C Network | September 29, 2017

    In a recent post, titled “10 Surprising Facts About Cloud Computing and What It Really Is”, Zac Johnson highlighted some interesting facts about cloud computing in the SMB…

ATMs Are IT Too!

By G C Network | September 5, 2017

That world of homogenous IT technology managed entirely by the internal IT organization has long disappeared.  Operations today require efficient and global management of technologically heterogeneous environments. The challenges and…

Digital Transformation Asset Management

By G C Network | August 30, 2017

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…

The Game of Clouds 2017

By G C Network | July 30, 2017

The AWS Marketplace is growing at breakneck speed, with 40% more listings than last year! This and more insights were revealed when CloudEndure used their custom tool to quickly scan the…

Managing Your Hybrid Cloud

By G C Network | July 14, 2017

Photo credit: Shutterstock   Runaway cloud computing cost may be causing an information technology industry crisis.  Expanding requirements, extended transition schedules and misleading marketplace hype have made “Transformation” a dirty word. …

American Airlines Adopts Public Cloud Computing

By G C Network | June 30, 2017

Did you know that the reservations systems of the biggest carriers mostly run on a specialized IBM operating system known as Transaction Processing Facility (TPF). Designed by IBM in the…

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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