Cloud and the New IT Operating Model
As IT organizations begin to rely more on cloud services – whether internally delivered or externally sourced – to deliver IT services that scale to meet business demand, from a management perspective, it forces a shift in how Infrastructure teams, IT Finance, and the CIO approach IT investments. However, in reality, most organizations lack the baseline data necessary to understand the ROI and TCO for implementing planned initiatives, whether an infrastructure service or a full IT service. Without this data, IT is limited in their ability to effectively engage the Lines of Business (LOB) around IT performance to budget for both keeping the lights on costs and new investments to accelerate business growth.
As both the Head of Infrastructure and Operations and the CIO move from seeing their responsibility around being a builder of services, to being a broker of services, they must transform the business management of their own services while also adopting processes that allow them to broker 3rd party services. IT leaders need tools to help determine the relative cost, SLAs, and time-to-value of consuming and delivering services via any cloud model – private, public or hybrid.
VMware’s Approach
VMware’s business management offerings address these needs, by delivering financial and quality (via Service Level Management) transparency and control around the services that the Enterprise consumes from wherever those services are delivered. Furthermore, VMware offering a unique solution to implementing business management capabilities for different stakeholders within the enterprise. VMware offers two approaches:
- Top down: comprehensive IT Financial Management that addresses the full IT services stack for CIOs and IT Finance teams
- Bottom up: Business Management for Cloud that first addresses Infrastructure services for Infrastructure and Operations teams
The bottom up approach, starting with Infrastructure, is unique to VMware and provides a strong fit with enterprises beginning their journey to the cloud, as well as, any enterprise undertaking a financial transparency initiative. VMware empowers the Head of Infrastructure and Operations with business management capabilities essential for creating/delivering/managing an SDDC-based cloud infrastructure, by providing an unparalleled easy on-ramp and fast time to value.
Tailored for managing infrastructure and applications, vRealize Business’s cloud business management capability:
- Provides service cost/usage transparency of private virtual/cloud infrastructure through out-of-the-box integration with other VMware products
- Compares the cost of private cloud services with public cloud alternatives
- Prices service catalog blueprints automatically for use in a self-service portal
As Infrastructure teams shift from a highly virtualized environment towards a private cloud, they can begin to establish cost
transparency into their Infrastructure-as-a-Service capabilities. The first step is to implement basic cost and usage metering for initial visibility. Then they can move up the maturity curve to comprehensive financial management of their Private Cloud, by implementing showback / chargeback, forecasting, and budgeting. Leveraging these fundamental capabilities, the enterprise can go even further by implementing financial management of the full IT services stack, including addressing both applications and projects, extending the business management capabilities to IT Finance and IT Executive teams.
Alternatively, the CIO and IT Finance teams can implement comprehensive IT Financial Management across the full IT spend. This approach leverages a flexible cost model and strong data management platform to collect and analyze operational data and financial data (e.g. General Ledger) across all IT services and activities to make fact-based investment decisions and help the CIO run IT like a business.
So, where are you in your financial transparency initiative? Do you have the right strategy and tools to get to where you need to be? Get the latest Gartner ITFM Market Guide for FREE from VMware to make sure you select the right approach for your specific goals.
Learn More
To learn more about how you can jump start your financial transparency initiative with VMware, visit us online at VMware vRealize Business.
