Business Service Management (BSM) solutions for cloud computing give IT organizations the control, visibility, and assurance they need to automate and manage highly dynamic, virtualized cloud computing environments. This approach is helping enterprises and service providers realize the potential of cloud computing. BSM is a comprehensive approach and unified platform for running IT.

Fundamental to what “makes” a cloud is very often the management technology. The enabling underlying infrastructure of a cloud solution is often built on top of a commodity server, a layer of virtualization technology, and then on top of that is the management capability.

It’s the management capability that makes the cloud “real.” BSM solutions, which are so critical to the management of the physical infrastructure, can deliver the same value for your cloud computing model. Through an integrated set of solutions, organizations can provide a set of IT services with the automated set of processes to manage the lifecycle of these applications and virtual systems — regardless of whether they are hosted on premise or off premise.

This automation is key to enabling the high level of dynamism that is fundamental and essential to the success of cloud computing. This capability also helps to maintain the control necessary to ensure high-quality service delivery and strict regulatory compliance.

IT organizations can now extend their internal data centers to external clouds, such as Amazon EC2 via unified, integrated BSM management solutions. Computing resources can be requested though an integrated self-service portal. The requests are tracked through an IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL®)-compliant change management system and automatically provisioned and configured in minutes. This self-service interface also supports service de-provisioning and service change requests.

The need for a strong management focus is increasingly important as enterprise organizations leverage external cloud resources to augment their existing infrastructures. A BSM approach can enable organizations to request, orchestrate and provision capacity across their existing internal IT resources and clouds in minutes, instead of weeks.

As you pursue a cloud initiative for your own organization, remember that the best practices based on BSM solutions to manage your physical infrastructure are just as critical in managing your cloud computing environment. They can help you meet your IT and business objectives and drastically reduce the time to change infrastructure and services in response to demand. You can move ongoing IT demand and consumption to a variable cost structure, and take a more precise, commoditized approach to service sourcing. The sky is the limit.

Sidebar:

You can bring the same level of service management capabilities, automation, and control expected from their physical and virtual environments to their cloud initiatives. By following a BSM approach, IT organizations can achieve the following results:

Establish private clouds as the next generation of automated and virtualized data centers
Establish a unified, actionable service catalog for internal and external IT services, associated service-level agreements and costs

Set and manage tiered service levels for a diverse cloud customer set
Provide self-service request and fulfillment of cloud resources and services to users
Automate the orchestration, provisioning, service changes, monitoring and management of cloud resources

Automate workload management, including real-time provisioning of virtual machines
Accurately forecast and track the cost of delivering services in the cloud
Maintain a “single source of truth” in a CMDB even as the cloud environment evolves 

(The author is Chief Technology Officer, BMC Software. The views expressed in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of CIOL.)