How to Transition to an IT Service Delivery Model
What happens in your organization when an internal customer requests resources for a special project or other needs?
In many organizations, the IT team embarks on an arduous journey from lengthy approval and procurement processes to configuration and implementation that can take weeks or months.
Ultimately, internal customers find a way around the obstacles. In the IT world, that means shadow IT.
The costs (and risks) of shadow IT
The democratization of IT today means that anyone with a credit card and an Internet connection can procure compute and storage resources almost overnight.
While some argue that this is a great way to drive innovation, there is a downside: shadow IT. “Gartner studies have found that shadow IT is 30 to 40 percent of IT spending in large enterprises, and our research at Everest Group finds it comprises 50 percent or more,” according to CIO.com.
If you’re an IT organization with a $1,000,000 budget, that’s up to $500,000 in unmanaged IT spend. And those unmanaged resources are likely inefficiently managed.
The bigger issue is the loss of control over data in the wild, both from a governance and security perspective, which can put organizations at great risk.
For example, would your internal customers know to ask a public cloud provider about whether their data is backed up to a secondary site—or if it costs more to do so? If they’re savvy enough to add backup, costs could suddenly balloon (though that’s preferable to foregoing backup and losing data due to an unforeseen event).
But wouldn’t it be great to avoid the risks and maintain control with a customized menu of services that enable your internal customers to order the services they need, when they need them? That’s where a service delivery model comes in.
Service delivery: Say “yes” to your internal customers
Transitioning to a service delivery model enables you to provide your internal customers with the services they need, when they need them—without a lengthy approval and procurement process.
Simply present a customized menu of resources—such as compute, storage, networking, data protection, etc.—with pre-determined costs, and let internal customers choose the IT services they need to quickly spin up their projects.
For example, the engineering team has a project for an auto supplier that requires 100TB of all-flash storage and a lot of compute power to support their VMs—and they need it tomorrow.
With IT service delivery, you can do what a public cloud provider can’t: ensure that the engineering team gets the resources they need at the best price, while keeping control of and protecting your data. And you can continue to optimize your infrastructure to achieve the right balance of performance, cost, risk, and more.
In this service-first environment, the IT team now becomes the enabler of “yes.” So how do you transition to a service delivery model?
NetApp Cloud Insights: Pulling back the curtain on your environment
The first step is to find out what resources you actually have. Done manually, this critical step takes an inordinate amount of time, expertise, and resources.
The NetApp Cloud Insights tool automates this process. It locates all your resources, including cloud and on-premises multivendor resources (and those resources hiding in the shadows), and provides advanced analytics on the interdependencies between them. It assembles a real-time data visualization of the topology, availability, performance, and utilization of all your infrastructure.
Showing how everything plays in the ecosystem provides the basis for transitioning to a service delivery model.
Logicalis: Helping your organization enable “yes”
Logicalis can help you transition your organization to a service-centered enterprise that truly serves your internal customers.
To minimize your time and effort, we start by remotely and securely installing the NetApp Cloud Insights tool and, over several weeks, unobtrusively analyzing data about your environment. The data that is accessed and collected never leaves the confines of your network.
With the resulting current-state view of your environment, we identify gaps and areas for optimization. We then schedule a complimentary, vendor-agnostic Cloudscape Workshop with you and your stakeholders to provide:
- An architecture design with service level definitions for your storage, compute, and data protection.
- A total cost of ownership and financial model.
- An implementation plan using your actual data.
Case in point: Enterprise financial services organization
In a Cloudscape Workshop, Logicalis showed a financial services organization with 300,000 customers multiple areas for optimization. We showed them how they could reduce costs by moving their VMs from a very expensive storage option to a less expensive option that also better matched their needs. Logicalis also identified compute and storage issues that occurred at every month-end, slowing down the closing process. After we showed the client how to fix the issue, they were able to reduce the time spent on their month-end closing.
To learn more about the Cloudscape Workshop, download the datasheet or call your Logicalis account executive. Or contact us for more information.
A respected industry veteran with more than 25 years of experience, Dennis Boutorwick is a NetApp Hybrid Cloud Sales Specialist at Logicalis, responsible for helping enterprise customers navigate the ever-changing landscape of hybrid IT and solve complex business problems through technology enablement.