Managing Cloud Services
The cloud service manages multiple infrastructures across several organizations which allow higher level of service capabilities available to build applications.
Cloud Management provides the capabilities required to offer self-service, on-demand deployment and management of applications and services across a federation of private, public and hybrid clouds. To deliver these capabilities, a true enterprise platform is necessary.
The high level capabilities required of a true enterprise grade cloud management platform.
- Automated Deployment and Management of Enterprise Applications
- Policy-based Enforcement of Governance, Compliance and Security across the full lifecycle of cloud applications and cloud environments.
- Integrated Application Release Automation across the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
IT Service Delivery Management defines the business process, through which it can:
- Clearly define the content of services
- Clearly define the roles and responsibilities of customers (those who pay for the services), users (those who use the services) and Service Providers
- Set expectations of service quality, availability and timeliness
Service Management
First step – Plan to implement Service Management
Infrastructure optimization goes beyond products and technologies. People and processes compose a large portion of an organization’s IT service maturity.
| PHASE | Description |
| Assess | Evaluate current capabilities and challenges focusing on enhancing the performance of people and IT service management processes |
| Identify | Prioritize improvement projects based on the business need. |
| Evaluate and Plan | Operational improvement relies on the identified and prioritized areas for improvement. |
| Deploy | Availability Management, Financial Management, Infrastructure Engineering, IT Service Continuity, Management, and Workforce Management |
Second Step – Define Service Management Framework
| SERVICE DELIVERY | |
| Service Level Management | Monitoring the performance of the IT department and periodically reviewing its compliance with SLAs |
| Financial Management | Justifying required changes and other expenditures in terms of cost versus benefit |
| Capacity Management | Monitoring the capacity of systems to ensure compliance with performance measures defined in SLAs |
| Availability Management | Managing, monitoring, and reporting the availability, reliability, and maintainability of systems |
| IT Service Continuity Management | Evaluation of threats, risks, vulnerabilities & development of countermeasures to ensure continuation in the event of an IT services disruption |
| SERVICE SUPPORT | |
| Infrastructure Management | Managing the technical plans for IT engineering, hardware, and enterprise architecture projects, and ensuring that quality deliverables are made |
| Change Management | Manage development, testing, and rolling out changes to the production environment |
| Release Management | Release new software, hardware, and process releases into the production and managed preproduction environment |
| Problem Management | Focuses on structuring the escalation process of investigation, diagnosis, resolution, and closure of problems |
| Configuration Management | Involves identifying, documenting, and tracking components of the environment and the relationships between them |
| Incident Management | Manage process of resolving any fault or disruption to the production system, including escalation |
| Service Monitoring and Control | Involves monitoring system performance to ensure that daily operations are compliant with SLAs |
| Service Desk | Single point of contact between the users and IT Service provider and organize customer communications about incidents, problems, and inquiries |
Service Management comprises the whole of the governance, processes, role and responsibility definitions, tools for automation, required information and best practices that integrate and operate available resources to produce valued services and respond quickly to the needs of a business and its cloud customer. The scope of service management includes anticipating business needs, services portfolio management, service life cycle management, service operation and continuous improvement.
Service Management is about the collaboration that takes place to create value between communities of customers and users, and communities of providers and suppliers. This means going beyond infrastructure management to provide business service management.