Clouds on the Horizon

Businesses are embracing Web-based services to speed up innovation, collaborate on a global scale, reduce operational costs, and grow their bottom line. Falling IT budgets, a shift by businesses from CAPEX to OPEX spending for IT solutions, and the maturing of on-demand technologies are driving businesses to outsourced models. As a result, new and traditional IT vendors, including Microsoft, are transitioning to a subscription-based services model.

Regardless of the terms cloud computing, on-demand, SaaS, or virtualized delivery, IT and business applications are increasingly being acquired and consumed as a utility. 

Casting a Shadow on Traditional IT

In a traditional enterprise setting, IT centralizes the procurement, license management, user administration, and security for all applications and infrastructure on behalf of the organization.  But by their very nature, SaaS applications and Cloud services cater to decentralized needs and distributed buying centers, resulting in decentralized visibility and control by IT departments.

This causes inherent issues for Enterprise IT including:

• Security:  Inability to enforce password policy, resulting in password proliferation when employees re-use corporate credentials for externally-hosted services.
• Compliance:  Limited IT view regarding where customer data resides and who has access.
• Auditability:  Difficulties in demonstrating compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements and other regulatory requirements such as HIPAA.
• Accountability:  Little ability to consolidate enterprise-wide buying power across external services, and therefore presenting challenges in implementing enterprise-wide licensing or departmental charge-back capabilities.
• Supportability:  Users are typically “on their own” in terms of provisioning, administration, and support escalations.

These issues make it difficult for IT to ensure uniform compliance with security and audit requirements, consolidate license management, and ensure a high quality of service and support for their users.

Enabling the On-Demand Enterprise

Cloud computing requires a different approach to building, deploying, managing, and controlling enterprise IT – an approach that shifts from long-term planning cycles and in-house application expertise to a services aggregation mind-set. In this model,  IT acts as an internal services provider that manages both mission-critical applications running on  internal computing assets and external cloud services  on behalf of the organization. 

In the on-demand enterprise model, IT’s role shifts to mixing and matching internal and external capabilities and services to meet current and emerging business needs.  This new sourcing model for on-premise/internal services and external services – whether they are infrastructure, platform, application, or business process outsourcing (BPO) services – focuses on profitability vs. cost control.

This allows IT to reduce idea-to-innovation barriers and timelines to improve overall productivity and collaboration by providing whatever capabilities are needed, whenever and wherever required.  It also requires that the IT organization establish capabilities for administering users and policies across a services grid.

Centralizing Cloud Control with Unified Services Management

Unified Services Management (USM) allows IT to manage services and users across a heterogeneous services grid. This includes centralizing procurement, , billing, security, administration, and user support of external Web-based services. With USM, enterprise IT organizations can consolidate their cloud services management by:

• Controlling: Single point of provisioning, billing, usage, and user administration across all SaaS and cloud services.
• Enforcing: Corporate policies and regulatory compliance requirements across all users, services, verticals and geographies.
• Auditing: Maintaining visibility and accountability of usage in a consistent format for all users and services.
• Managing: Centralized integration with existing processes, policies, and infrastructure.
• Reporting: Quantitative and qualitative data on services usage.

Unified Services Management Architecture

The Unified Services Management approach combines an Enterprise Services Grid with an Enterprise Services Integration Layer.  The Enterprise Services Grid is an abstraction layer that leverages a managed services infrastructure. It aggregates order management, security and policy management, user and service administration, billing and departmental charge-backs, usage reporting and auditing, and license management across all external 3^rd party SaaS and Cloud services.  This allows services to be acquired, enabled, and managed in a consistent manner throughout the organization.  The services grid includes services integration toolkits and capabilities that allow enterprises to integrate existing SaaS and Cloud licenses (e.g. SalesForce.com, WebEx, hosted Exchange, and other services) and external  services with USM’s centralized access, user and service administration, reporting, billing and settlement, and helpdesk ticketing capabilities.

The Enterprise Services Integration Layer, in turn, provides connectivity between the Services Grid, internal users and IT assets, including administrative tools, helpdesks, directories and databases, and finance and accounting systems.  Major service components include:

• Unified Services Management control panel that provides users with single-sign-on access to all services, and rich administrative functions for IT to manage services and users in accordance with internal corporate governance and regulatory compliance requirements.
• Ability to integrate with internal LDAP directories and databases, allowing IT to automate user/service authorization, provisioning, and SSO against enterprise directories or user databases.
• Automated billing feeds from external services, enabling IT to integrate external services usage with internal accounting systems to facilitate departmental charge-backs based on external services usage.
• Unified Services Management Dashboards to help IT centrally manage enterprise-wide volume-licensing and optimization of external SaaS and Cloud services.

Unified Services Management Benefits

Unified Services Management enables enterprises to centralize the procurement, provisioning, billing, security, administration, and user support of external Web-based services. USM provides detailed reports on usage that allow enterprise IT departments to:

• Optimize the deployment of SaaS and Cloud services throughout their organizations, ensuring licenses are fully allocated.
• Provide a single view of all services costs, whether they are external SaaS and Cloud applications, or internally hosted
• Track new enterprise users, with automated alerts if new licenses need to be purchased or existing unused licenses need to be reallocated to other users.
• Audit log-in activities, including the ability to run historical reports showing which users have had access to which application services over a given period of time.
• Have visibility on new services requests from various functional departments, ensuring IT is able to rapidly meet emerging organizational needs for ad hoc SaaS applications and Cloud services.
• Monitor their pool of unused licenses, making it easier to reallocate IT budgets from services not being utilized to new service requests.

Conclusion

As enterprises increasingly co-mingle on-premise IT applications and infrastructures with cloud-based alternatives, the complexity associated with maintaining centralized control over provisioning, security, audit, compliance, and licensing increases exponentially. What’s needed is a unified approach to services management that can operate as a proxy between internal IT resources and external IT services, and allow enterprises to maintain a firm grip over two very different computing ecosystems.

About the Author:

Steve Crawford is Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Jamcracker.  Previously he led marketing and business development at PKWARE, launched VeriSign’s enterprise application security solutions business, and led marketing, business development, and product development functions at Octel Communications and Lockheed Martin.