Provance ITSM: Top 3 IT Trends For 2019 You Can No Longer Ignore

Since it’s another new year, I thought it would be a good time to discuss some major trends you can no longer ignore. Whether you are currently thinking about your opportunities for Azure, are actively migrating, or have services already running, these trends will change the way you run IT forever.

IT Trend #1: Fluid IT Services

Organizations require tools which will help them run their business faster, better and cheaper. Whether it’s for customer relationship management, the production line or logistics, often, these areas now encompass digital processes and require a digital transformation. Whatever the business need is—short-term or long-term—the software will need to be up and running quickly, as well as scalable to the immediate needs of the business. IT will no longer be required to set up a server, install software on it, deploy clients and run an application because the software must allow for a much more fluid way of changing the IT infrastructure. Consuming software will be like consuming water, turning it on and off as required as long as you need it, in the amount and quality that you need it. This trend will impact the way in which you manage IT. It’s inescapable. You’ll need to adapt and embrace the digital revolution.

IT Trend #2: “Rent-able” Infrastructure and Applications

We understand the challenges IT faces to keep up-to-date with existing hardware, software licenses, maintenance contracts and the lifecycle of IT components. IT Asset Management is a cost and resource intensive initiative, and the costs generated to manage assets are often not calculated in the purchase budget, which impacts future investments. By renting IT, businesses can get the support they need without having to pay and house components they don’t even understand. In the new cloud world, costs will be generated by consuming services. From an infrastructure perspective, you’ll need to plan how consumption can be linked to business units, consider a much shorter lifecycle for resources, and find better ways to set up and remove resources.

IT Trend #3: Discover Change, Not Infrastructure

Traditionally, discovery tools provide insight into what’s running in on-premise infrastructures and what’s changed over time. They allowed reporting and documentation in the ever-changing world of IT. Without them, infrastructure managers would be blind to what they have. Even with discovery tools though, planning and documentation often drift apart from each other in an on-premise infrastructure because things often change over the course of a lengthy build process. While in a cloud-native environment, the plan is the deployment process. The plan (a.k.a. the code) can be initiated as infrastructure with the press of a button. You get instant deployments, optimized lead time, and less lifecycle management overhead. This allows IT more time to focus on discovering the needs of the business and developing that infrastructure plan. In an online-only infrastructure, there is no need for post-discovery anymore as the cloud is the current state of the CMDB.

Embrace the Trends with Provance ITSM

To face the trends outlined above, we built technology to combine the worlds of on-premise and Cloud to give you a 360° view of your IT environment. For your on-premise infrastructure, we allow you to import data from the most commonly used client management tool in the world—System Center Configuration Manager. Get your clients, servers and software into the CMDB by leveraging common Microsoft Technology.

For your Cloud (Azure) infrastructure, Provance ITSM Cloud Service Management for Azure capability lets you import tenants, subscriptions, resource groups and resources into the CMDB. By using resource tags as filters, you can easily define what you want to see in the CMDB. A scheduled sync of the CMDB allows you to refresh based on your deployment cycles. Furthermore, you can augment the data coming from Azure with account, contact and additional description information to do your own reporting and assignment to organizational entities. This gives you a more ITSM-based view of your cloud environment and provides a consistent view into your subscriptions and consumption.

The Cloud Service Management for Azure capability also shows removed cloud resources no longer in the CMDB. Imagine a virtual machine being spun up for only a couple of days, generating costs and then being removed from the subscription. In Azure you have no way to show these deleted items, while in Provance ITSM you can configure how long deleted resources are available for reference.

We’ve recently enhanced our Cloud Service Management for Azure capability, click here for more information.