IT as a Service; Trends in The Cloud, Mobility & IT Service Management

How has IT as a Service changed just in this last year? The major impact on IT as a Service over the past year actually involves three key areas:

One is the cloud becoming more and more ubiquitous, so the idea of acquiring your IT services through the cloud, be it any of the different flavors of public, private or hybrid cloud, has become markedly more mainstream. There are so many more choices out there, a lot of safe and secure choices, everything from spot solutions in the cloud up to large-scale enterprise solutions in the cloud. Another dynamic is that there are still a lot of needs in the marketplace that are not truly cloud-ready. There are still many needs for dedicated physical infrastructure, customized security, dedicated applications and specific service levels that many client still require, not necessarily the shared service model that typically is the general cloud. Watching the different offerings and operating models with wildly varying success rates is a very an interesting dynamic in the marketplace over the last year.

The second area over the past year or so is the meteoric rise of mobility as a service going mainstream in a very large way. The whole notion that what I’m holding in my hand is no longer a phone, it’s actually a full blown computer. Your target distribution platform for the IT service now needs to be a mobile device as well as a traditional computer, and that could be a smart phone, it could be a tablet, it could be one of hundreds of flavors of different combinations of computing devices and networks that enable that end user. Clearly solutions around that mobility paradigm are very important part of IT as a service. What enterprise of any scale could consume holistic IT as a service, without considering the cloud and mobility? We believe these two paradigm shifts are real and have gone mainstream and that smart mobile device should enable my applications, my data, my business process in a way that I’m used to my laptop or my desktop enabling; mobility that allows me to easily consume and even produce the IT services that I require is now truly mainstream.

The third area of IT as a Service in general that has developed is the wholesale adoption of services oriented operating models by corporate IT organizations, be they insourced or outsourced. The notion of a service paradigm has become the norm, whereby IT is no longer about speeds, feeds and features of a particular technology, but it is truly focused on the services required to support and enable the business. Reliable, scalable and predictable outcomes are now the drivers with well-defined governance models and service levels. Formal IT Service Management (ITSM) models, principles and standards have become an integral part of this services construct, and now even enabled by choices for ITSM as a Service in the cloud.