IT Services Delivery- "From the Ground to the Cloud"
Current IT service environments in many enterprises are often faced with the difficult task of leveraging the old, the current and the upcoming technologies. Dissimilar technologies use legacy applications and legacy systems and are often loosely coupled with current “semi-open systems” while administrators look toward the future with the hope of connecting these existing systems to “newer” technologies. Even grander is the service provider or service administrator’s hope of keeping in alignment with the five major pillars of ITIL v3 library: 1) Service Strategy; 2) Service Design; 3) Service Transition; 4) Service Operation; 5) Continual Service Improvement. The question then would be, how does the service provider or service administrator stay in alignment with the five major pillars of ITIL v3 library while moving toward “newer” IT technologies?
Maybe a better question would be, what IT technologies make it easier for the service provider or service administrator stay in alignment with the five major pillars of ITIL v3 library? These challenges still exist (and one may argue that these challenges may appear to be hidden in “Cloud” environments). Providing fast, flexible and responsive IT services and technologies to address the aforementioned in the Cloud requires thoughtful planning. Within this framework, one’s chosen technologies involve solutions that are flexible and have collaborative APIs allow for more extensible solutions that are interoperable and are vender agnostic. Technologies in the area of Server, OS, and Application virtualization allow for solutions that stay within the strictest SLA requirements by providing high availability, excellent performance and fast recovery. Technologies in the areas of Networks and Network virtualization provide the means for providing highly available, high performance and fault tolerant connectivity. Technologies in the areas of Storage and Storage virtualization should be highly available, high performing and highly recoverable.
Now what I just wrote was a lot of jargon. As far as purely physical environments with lots of servers and lots of networks and lots of storage and OSs and Applications, applying ITIL practices is nothing new. Why don’t we just “bundle” everything up and put it in a box and call it virtualization or cloud computing and all our ITIL worries will diminish or just go away? Not so fast! While Virtualization or Cloud computing can bring containment and consolidation to the overall breadth and scope of IT computing environments, the challenges of applying ITIL practices to Virtualized environments still exist. In my next blog, I will tackle each of the five ITIL pillars as they pertain to Virtualized or Cloud Computing environments, one byte at a time.
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