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Making the Transition
The
Changing
Role Of IT
How to Succeed in
the Age of Cloud
CONTENTS:
1 Changing IT . . . .
Page 3
2 What’s Needed? . . . .
Page 7
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IT departments have traditionally had a well-defined set of responsi-bilities, including systems administration and maintenance, policy and regulatory compliance, and cost reduction and control.
Today’s IT leaders are tasked with transforming business processes, supporting growth and revenue enhancement by delivering new services and customer experiences.
How does the cloud impact these demands? For many IT organizations, cloud computing is a double-edged sword. It has enabled the growth of “shadow IT”, whereby line of business (LOB) departments are securing and paying for their own applications, outside of the control of IT. In fact, a recent report from Vanson Bourne found that 77% of IT decision-makers surveyed reported that LOBs in their organization are doing so.
At the same time, the cloud is the vehicle that can enable IT to enhance its effectiveness and its relationship with the business. Instead of focusing on systems administration and maintenance, IT will recommend services, orchestrate solutions and allocate workload based on price, service levels and policies.
The promise of the cloud is that IT can transition from infrastructure management and systems administration to value-added service brokers and innovation drivers of new services. In short, IT can lead the business forward instead of being order takers and problem fixers. In many orga-nizations, IT is part way there.
Changing IT
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In a survey of 1300 IT leaders, 39% view IT as a service broker
or consultant to business units, while just 11% view IT as a
“developer of new, innovative services” and just 14% as a
“driver of new business initiatives.”
“TechInsights Report: The Changing Role of IT and What to Do About It”,
Vanson Bourne
What’s stopping us from
making more progress?
#1 The Pace of Change
While not all “commonly held beliefs” are actually true, several studies confirm that the pace of change of new technology is accelerating. While it took many decades for the telephone to reach widespread adoption in the U.S., it took only 10 years for smartphones to reach 40% penetration.
What are some implications of this accelerating rate of change?
• For IT, the diversity of devices that must be supported in this age of “Bring Your Own Device” presents just one huge challenge when it comes to enterprise support and applications.
• The pace of change is outpacing our ability to adopt them. • Rapid technological change makes it difficult for IT personnel to
keep their skills current.
• Cloud adoption, especially outside of IT, presents new security and privacy threats.
5 #2 Legacy IT
Virtualization has been the basis of cloud computing and according to several research surveys, average x86 server virtualization levels exceed 50% of all server workloads.
However, that means almost half of servers, and the applications they host, are not virtualized. There are a number of reasons for the continued usage of “physical bare metal” servers. Sometimes it’s performance, as applications like database, or those that require low latency like financial trading applications, need all the speed the server can deliver. In many other cases it is due to legacy applications that can’t be easily virtualized.
Legacy IT is an anchor to innovation. Unless we find a way to manage the baggage we are saddled with, it is very difficult to move forward and adopt more useful technologies. To effectively move forward we need to devise a management strategy that will allow us to manage legacy, existing and new platforms together.
#3 Management Sprawl
The explosive growth of Software as a Service (SaaS), increasing user demand, shorter time lines, the growth of mobile and the age of Bring Your Own Device have resulted in a mix of IT infrastructure and the use of public, private and hybrid cloud services. However this has continued to exacerbate a long-time issue in the data center – the proliferation of management systems, each designed to control just a piece of an organi-zation’s computing environment.
Every new piece of technology comes with its own management platform or user interface - which only controls that little piece. This ‘sprawl’ leads to extremely siloed environments and requires continual staff training.
This approach is extremely inefficient and costly. What is needed is a
holistic management platform, one in which the IT staff can command and control the full range of platforms.
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What’s Needed?
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95% of IT professionals said a Single
Pane of Glass would be somewhat to
very effective for their organization
.
What is needed is the ability to manage physical and virtual infrastruc-tures as well as public, private and hybrid clouds without multiple management tools.
Cloud services are typically built using cloud provisioning and manage-ment software. Clearly there is a need for a single solution that can bridge the gap to enable the management of both physical and virtual worlds. Most importantly, to run today’s mixed infrastructure effectively, provi-sioning and management solutions must include support for private and public clouds, multi-vendor hardware, multiple hypervisors and virtual and physical servers.
Key Functions Needed Include:
• period of usage
• consumption data
• service level contracted for
• roles management
• financial management
• asset tracking
So…how do you move forward knowing you can’t leave it all behind? Egenera provides cloud orchestration and management systems to leading enterprises, service providers and other organizations. Egenera Cloud Suite (ECS) combines PAN Cloud Director™ and PAN Manager® software to deliver a best in class platform that makes it simple to design, deploy, manage and protect cloud services.
Most importantly, Egenera Cloud Suite enables cloud deployment of complex, multi-tier applications, with the level of availability, flexibility and security you need. Egenera Cloud Suite software delivers advantages you can’t get from other cloud management platforms:
• Custom design capabilities; critical for multi-tier applications • Bare metal access; instantly provision bare metal servers • Integrated HA/DR; dedicated (1 to 1) or shared (many to 1)
• Custom OS; Support for any x86 OS, BYOI – bring your own oper-ating system image
• Multi-cloud capabilities; allocate workloads to where they are best run
• Hybrid environments; mix on and off premise resources in an appli-cation template
• Complete business process management; full life cycle support
Egenera for the Cloud
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For IT Ops
Egenera Cloud Suite
For User Self ServiceHeadquarters Egenera, Inc. 80 Central Street Boxborough, MA 01719 U.S.A. P: 978.206.6300 www.egenera.com email: info@egenera.com Asia/Pacific Office Egenera, K.K. Shinjuku NS Building 6F, 2-4-1 Nishishinjuku, Shinjuku-ku Tokyo 163-0806 Japan P: +81.3.5321.7157 www.japan.egenera.com email: info-jp@egenera.com Europe/Middle East/Africa Egenera Ltd. 3015 Lake Drive
Citywest Business Campus Co. Dublin Ireland P: +353 (0)1 485 3473 email: emea@egenera.com Europe/Middle East/Africa Egenera GmbH Dornhofstrasse 34 63263 Neu Isenburg Germany P: +49 (0)6102 812230 email: emea@egenera.com Europe/Middle East/Africa Egenera Ltd. Squires House 205A High Street West Wickham, BR4 0PH United Kingdom P: +44 (0) 870 392 6468 email: emea@egenera.com
To learn more about making the transition from MSP to CSP with Egenera please contact the Egenera Team at:
Email: info@egenera.com Web: www.egenera.com Phone: 978.206.6300
