Cloud managementStrategy

After years of helping their businesses implement enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to simplify, standardize, and automate business processes, IT organizations now have to play catch-up and do the same for their own processes. It is a need heightened by increasing demands for high business service availability and performance across mainframe, distributed, and virtualized cloud environments.

Just as ERP automates and simplifies business planning and operations, business service management (BSM) will offer the platform for IT to plan and deliver services effectively.

"We view BSM as the ERP for IT," said Chip Salyards, vice president for Asia Pacific at BMC Software. "It's about having the business purpose behind what to do with the data. It's about collecting all the disparate siloes of information and providing the ability for IT to manage it like a business for the business."

Earlier this year, Forrester Consulting surveyed 327 enterprise infrastructure executives and architects across the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific on behalf of BMC. For 81% of respondents, a comprehensive cloud strategy is a high priority for the next year.

However, CIOs surveyed are concerned that business leaders are willing to circumvent IT to run mission-critical workloads on public cloud services, regardless of policy. So, as 71% of survey respondents thought, IT operations should ensure public cloud services meet their firm's requirements for performance, security and availability.

For cloud environments, an integrated IT service management foundation for BSM provides the visibility and control of IT services and processes so critical to the success of the applications that power business services. Additionally, real-time visibility into the user performance of these services has to be maintained without limiting the ability of IT to leverage different cloud platforms and acceleration solutions to ensure optimal performance.

To help organizations plan, build and run cloud computing, BMC software proposes a blueprint that helps them request and support business services; provision and configure resources; monitor and operate the cloud environment; plan and govern to ensure compliance; and integrate and orchestrate the services.