How not to fail at Cloud Service Management - Part 1

New solutions, new opportunities, new challenges

One of the most significant trends shaping the IT services market is the widespread adoption of cloud services. Gartner analysts predict that by 2028, the use of cloud solutions and services will become a key factor in business competitiveness. It is clear that cloud solutions are becoming more prevalent across all sectors, with companies in all sectors and even among our customers, where cloud was previously a buzzword, adopting a cloud strategy. In order to implement these strategies to create real business value, it is essential to have the right service offerings and lifecycle, processes and policies in place.

The key to reaping the benefits

Cloud services have a number of known benefits, with scalability, flexibility, cost-effectiveness, increased security through the use of cloud providers, easier and faster use of state-of-the-art technologies and reduced operational complexity being the most strategically important, while cloud-first or cloud-only solutions are increasingly emerging on the market, with suppliers building services primarily or exclusively in cloud environments.

The Cloud Adoption and Well Architected Framework documents produced by the various cloud providers provide guidance on how to take advantage of these benefits and provide a well-defined direction at a strategic level, but issues raised during deployment projects and user experience show that cloud solutions often fail to achieve their intended purpose and fail to deliver the benefits, leaving customers dissatisfied.

The problem itself is not new, if we look at the major changes published in the successive versions of ITIL, the most well known IT operations methodology, it is clear that we need to find new answers to new challenges (a good example is how the adoption of agile methodologies and DevOps approach in ITIL 4 has changed the way change management is handled)

I think the key to realising the benefits of cloud solutions is also the service approach, which is what allows us to really realise the benefits of the new service logic and advanced technology.

In the following, I have identified the areas that need to be properly managed to ensure successful cloud operations and customer satisfaction.

 Service design & life cycle

Depending on the services we use and the customers we want to serve, there is a bewilderingly wide range of cloud services available, from customising Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions to publishing applications developed on Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions to migrating to resources purchased as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), there are many use cases. Complex solutions are often designed using a combination of these.

Another important consideration when designing our own services in the cloud is who we provide them to:

• we provide development environments for development teams (IT for IT)

• or we want to provide a service to end users,

• either by migrating or enhancing a previous solution

• or by building a completely new solution.

In the design of cloud services, it is also essential to thoroughly assess and understand user or customer needs and determine which IT functions can meet these needs.

One of the key challenges we have experienced with our customers is defining a service lifecycle process where the right decisions are made at the right point about whether a particular need can be met in a cloud environment and whether it is worth implementing. The question of feasibility requires a decision gate or gates where all relevant areas are involved (operations, legal, procurement, infrastructure and solution architects, compliance, etc.), thus ensuring that the necessary questions are asked and thus the inputs for the decision. It is important to see that the cloud is not only a technology solution but also a service logic, which raises a number of issues from an outsourcing or data security perspective for example.

Defining the right business cases is at least as important, we need to be able to compare and price alternatives using different cloud and on-premises solutions and make the necessary calculations (ROI) based on sound estimates.

For services published in the cloud environment, it is important to review from time to time what benefits can be realised and to revise these economics on that basis. For example, for workloads where the number of users does not change drastically and usage patterns do not cause changing workloads, the benefits of flexible scalability cannot be realised and it may be appropriate to migrate to some on-premises solution. Also part of the lifecycle is the operation, regulation and cost control of edge services, which I will discuss in more detail later in this series.

In the next part, we will look at the key ITSM processes related to cloud services and lessons learned from their implementation.