IT Service Management: Meet the Challenge of Managing the Cloud

Many businesses are embracing the Cloud and digital business to better engage customers, empower employees and transform products. Gartner contends that 90 percent of large enterprises have already started along a path to digital business while 58 percent already use a cloud service for some aspect of their business.^[1] Businesses are adopting cloud solutions across all aspects of their business and it’s likely already reaching the tipping point in many large companies as the preferred method for running their businesses.

Cloud Power for Organizational Control

Many Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions are easy-to-implement—as easy as drinking a glass of water for today’s tech-savvy employees—which has led to a wild west atmosphere in many companies of “Stealth IT” or “Shadow IT” (software built and/or deployed by other departments without the knowledge of the IT department). Gartner recently conducted a survey and found that CMOs, on average, allocated 3.24 percent of their budget to technology, while CIOs allocated 3.4 percent of their budget.^[2] What’s the impact of all this technology being bought and managed by someone other than the IT department?

The organizational and financial impact of hidden cloud resources can be great if IT is unaware of and unable to track cloud resources operationally or financially. For example, if a person leaves a company, the subscription they ordered on the company card can keep automatically renewing for months or even years if no one is keeping track of who and why a specific software is being used. Or another example, a mission critical subscription doesn’t auto-renew because no one was aware that the credit card expired or when the person ordered they set it to not auto-renew. The possibilities for financial impact of all this Shadow and Stealth IT are endless. Fundamentally, money is going to be burned and a company isn’t going to function well if there are numerous clouds because there are numerous departments, teams or individuals.

So, whether or not IT wants to manage the Cloud, it is all going to end up in their court of responsibility anyway. Provance ITSM Cloud Service Management for Azure helps IT meet this challenge, by making information from Azure visible and manageable in Provance ITSM as well as integrating Cloud services, CIs and business services within Provance ITSM—the first ITSM solution to provide full visibility from a single point-of-view. For Managed Service Providers or large enterprises with hundreds of subscriptions, Cloud Service Management for Azure delivers a new way of managing their cloud resources while having full visibility all in one place.

Giving More Cloud Power to the Service Desk

The Service Desk is probably the best-monitored entity in an organizations’ IT department. Resolution-times, SLAs, customer satisfaction surveys, all of these metrics are used to measure the effectiveness of the Service Desk.

Let’s imagine a scenario in which a project owner calls the Service Desk and says, “My project’s virtual machine, Apache01 in Azure is down, can you help me?” And the Service Desk Agent has zero visibility on the virtual machine, nor on the Azure Subscription. So the Service Desk answers, “Sorry, I don’t know where this system is located, I need to escalate to the next level.” Of course, escalating to the next level delays the resolution of the issue, leading to an unpleasant Service Desk experience for all involved, not to mention a delay in the project that was relying on the virtual machine.

However, if the organization had the Provance ITSM Cloud Service Management for Azure implemented, the scenario could end in a completely different way. The Service Desk Agent would take a quick look at the Cloud Service Management dashboard (see screenshot below) and simply reply, “Yes, I can see the VM is there, but it’s currently shut down, shall I start it for you?”