Cloud Computing - Service Management Challenges (Part Two)

Cloud computing is receiving a lot of press recently. Anyone in the industry can’t help but notice the increasing marketing push by the infrastructure, platform and application vendors.

What exactly do we mean by Cloud Computing? The most concrete and widely accepted definition seems to be the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) definition of cloud computing, which we covered in part one of this series.

Implications and Challenges

So what does this all mean for Service Management? At first glance it could be seen a readily facilitating the BSM dream, whereby a business can define tight SLAs for technical services that are required to support their Business Services.

However, for an enterprise who may be considering the leap into using cloud based services there are a multitude of things to consider.

This brief article is intended to provide some food for thought in this regard.

Impact on a few of the key ITIL processes

Incident Management

Modern enterprise systems are complex. Identifying the cause of an incident when parts of the infrastructure/service are ‘in the cloud’ can be difficult, especially as these services may be only serving part of a process.

It is also worth thinking about how Incidents will be passed to and from the cloud provider. Clearly an automated solution would be preferable as no business wants to be in a telephone queue to the provider of your CRM system when you have a severity one and angry customers of your own to deal with. On the other side of the coin…you need to be informed that there is an issue before your customers find out.

Service Asset and Configuration Management

In the past few years enterprises have made great strides in understanding their infrastructure and service topology and modelling these in a CMDB. How does replacing your own infrastructure with cloud based solutions affect this as a trend? The intuitive and wrong answer is ‘phew…we don’t need to worry about THAT anymore’! This is unfortunately not the case. Companies still have business services to operate and will undoubtedly still have some infrastructure to manage. When your customers complain that function x is no longer working, you will still need to understand what the underpinning technical services are, whether they are internal or external or a combination of both.

Access Management

There are several challenges that present themselves in this area. Most enterprises will have a robust internal IDM solution. Enterprises need to consider this will integrate with the chosen cloud service. Sharing Identity and Access Control amongst systems you own and maintain is one problem, sharing these across disparate third party managed systems is quite another.

In the modern workplace staff turnover can be quite high, It is important to consider how quickly can these cloud based services activate and deactivate users.

General Considerations

Security

One of the key concerns that is raised in almost every conversation about cloud computing is data and system security.  Enterprises need to consider any commercial and/or regulatory constraints. Quite apart from any regulatory implications, we have all seen the bad press that accompanies a personal data leak for any large company. It is clearly critical that in choosing which systems to put in the cloud, which deployment model to choose, and which provider to select that data and system security is paramount.

The Cloud Security Alliance have prepared some excellent guidelines on moving your data, functions, applications and processes into the cloud. The guidelines centre around the decision making process as to which of your systems are you able or willing to risk in the cloud.

Availability

The elasticity of cloud based services is one of the strong selling points, but how do we guarantee that availability?

The ‘on-demand’ , ‘under the hood’ nature of the automated computing, storage and network resources provided by Cloud computing can give the illusion that these resources are infinite and will be always available. While in most situations this may be true, anyone who has worked with a large financial system one can imagine the load put on a thousand ERP solutions at year end.

Conclusion

Clearly the above is just touching the surface, and represents just some of the areas for discussion amongst our consultants when assisting customers making the leap to the cloud. It should be an interesting journey, and one we hope we will share with many of you.

Of course, cutting through all of the above is  Service Level Management.

In part 3 of this series we will explore some of the issues pertaining to Service Level Management and the cloud.