IT management as a service is coming to a data center near you

IT management as a service is coming to a data center near you

An IT industry analyst article published by SearchITOperations.


article_IT-management-as-a-service-is-coming-to-a-data-center-near-you
IT management as a service uses big data analytics and vendors’ expertise to ease the IT administration and optimization process. IT orgs must trust the flow of log and related data into an offsite, multi-tenant cloud.

Mike Matchett

IT management as a service finally breaks through. Where does it go from here?

Perhaps the über IT trend isn’t about hailing a ride from within the data center, but adopting and migrating to newer generations of tools that ease the cost and pain of managing infrastructure.

It’s not efficient for each IT shop to individually develop and maintain siloed expertise in managing every vendor-specific component. The physical — and financial — limits of IT shops are by and large why cloud service providers continue to gain ground.

Today, there is an inexorable transition toward commoditized physical equipment with differentiating software-defined capabilities floated in on top. Using commodity hardware offers direct CapEx benefits. However, by taking advantage of software resources — and virtualization — to pre-integrate multiple infrastructure layers, converged and hyper-converged platforms also eliminate significant IT time and labor required by traditional, siloed architectures. In freeing up IT, the converged and hyper-converged options also improve overall agility and help IT groups transition from equipment caretakers to business enhancers.

In a similar bid to lower management OpEx pain, IT operations and management solutions are slowly and inexorably increasing inherent automation. Policy-based approaches help an IT organization address scale and focus on building the right services for their users instead of remaining stuck in low-level, tedious and often reactive “per-thing” configuration and management. And much of the appeal of cloud computing is based on offloading IT by offering end-user self-service capabilities.

But even in running a hyper-converged or hybrid cloud data center, there are still plenty of IT hours spent thanklessly on internally facing operations and management tasks. Operating a cloud, a cluster, a hybrid operation — even just maintaining the actual management tools that run the operations and automation — can still be a huge chore. Similar to how many businesses now use the cloud as a source of easy, catalog-driven, self-service, elastic, utility-priced application computing, IT is starting to look to the cloud for IT management as a service.

The broadening acceptance of public cloud services is inverting the traditional IT management paradigm, moving management services into the cloud while preserving on-premises — or hybrid — computing and infrastructure. This has been a long, slow battle due to ingrained IT tradition, security fears and worries about losing control; there’s a reluctance to let go of the private management stack. But the drive to make IT more efficient and productive is now taking priority.

We are seeing the inevitable acceptance and widespread adoption of remote, cloud-hosted IT management services, from remote performance management to hybrid cloud provisioning and brokering and even on-premises “cluster” operations. These services can be referred to collectively as IT management as a service, or IT MaaS…(read the complete as-published article there)