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As the cloud gains traction as an effective way to speed the delivery of IT services, leveraging IT Service Management (ITSM) toolsets is key to ensuring enterprises deploy an effective cloud strategy. Here are five areas in which ITSM plays a crucial role:

  • IT Efficiency: As IT services are pushed to the cloud—often through different service providers—the governance of incident and change management becomes critical to creating a cloud strategy that maintains the efficiencies and speed gained by moving to the artSilense/Bigstocknew model. ITSM serves as the mortar that holds together the individual components of the new IT delivery model.
  • Business Alignment: With service providers targeting business units rather than IT, IT must quickly assess the impact of new service offerings and how they tie into the company’s overall IT strategy. Without a service management model in place, IT risks losing the crucial alignment between IT and the business.
  • Automated Service Management: IT must manage what it cannot automate. Thus, the automation of key processes in governing the evolution of a company’s service delivery options is critical; otherwise, bottlenecks can quickly occur. Without ITSM tools to control the chaos, IT can become the very bottleneck the cloud delivery model exists to resolve.
  • Change Management: As cloud models evolve, direct IT control over the service delivery landscape lessens. It is thus more critical to manage and track changes to ensure that what’s working in an in-house data center and delivered by a host of disparate service providers all works seamlessly. This ensures IT can catch and correct issues that cause serious performance degradations before they occur.
  • Self Service: In the cloud, more decision making is placed in the hands of end users. While end users want to spin up servers in the cloud as needed, IT has to govern those actions with tools that prevent cloud sprawl and the unchecked costs that result without an ITSM model in place.

To find out how Logicalis can help your organization leverage ITSM to ensure you deploy an effective cloud strategy, visit http://www.us.logicalis.com/solutions-and-services/itsm/.