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Inspiration for the modern business
Volume 4 : Issue 2 : November / December 2010

Closing the gap

between business & IT
Shifting the focus
on to business benefits

The consumerisation of IT
The changing face of IT in the workplace

IT governance
Securing the IT estate

FEATURE FOCUS: SOFTWARE AS A CHOICE – THE RISE OF SaaS: 28-31

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IT as a Service
Virtualisation is the foundation for unlocking the potential of
cloud computing. VitAL editor Matt Bailey asked John Murnane
of virtualisation leaders VMware, how Service Management
will feature in the move into this brave new virtual world.

M igration to the cloud is becoming

increasingly accepted by many
organisations as the foremost solution
to an increasingly complex IT world. “IT
infrastructures have become too complex
and brittle,” confirms EMEA sales director
for virtualisation specialist VMware, John
Murnane. “IT has become pervasive in
business, but its organic growth means that
it has ended up as a mishmash of services
and solutions. With users demanding faster
response times from IT organisations and
management demanding lower costs, IT
needs a better strategy for delivering services
to the business.
“Cloud computing is an approach that
reduces IT complexity by leveraging the
efficient pooling of on-demand, self-managed
virtual infrastructure, consumed as a service.
Cloud computing is central to that better
strategy and virtualisation is the foundation
for enabling this transition.”

A virtual pioneer
VMware delivers customer-proven virtualisation,
cloud infrastructure and management
solutions that reduce IT complexity and
enable the transition to a more efficient and
flexible service delivery model: IT as a Service.
VMware’s innovation and excellence has been
recognised by strategic research firms globally
and more than 260 industry awards.
As part of its expanding portfolio of
management solutions, earlier this year,
the company acquired certain software
products and expertise from EMC’s Ionix IT
management business.
At the time Paul Maritz, president and chief
executive officer of VMware commented,
“Customers are increasingly leveraging
virtualisation as the foundation for modern
IT architectures and their path to cloud

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computing. Essential to this evolution is the
ability to provide visibility and compliance from
virtualised applications down to the underlying
physical infrastructure. The acquisition of these
Ionix products and expertise promises to
further establish VMware vCenter as the next
generation management platform for private
cloud infrastructures.”
Transforming IT
IT departments are tasked with handling
increasing demands from the business,
with responsiveness and agility. Yet many
IT organisations struggle to meet business
needs in a timely way because applications
and services run on infrastructures that can be
costly to manage and challenging to change.
Cloud computing can provide the solution to
overcoming these challenges.
“When building a cloud infrastructure the
initial challenge is how you start the journey.
And it’s the service management function that
has to address the change from the current
state to the desired state,” says Murnane.
“There has been a gold rush into virtualisation
with organisations retrospectively trying to
work out how to deal with it. The change has
to be managed properly, and to virtualise
successfully customers need a high degree
of confidence that their infrastructure will be
managed accordingly. While cloud computing
provides the approach, we deliver a pragmatic
path and customer-proven solutions that allow
organisations to preserve existing technology
investments, while achieving the goal
of enabling IT as a Service.”
IT as a Service
IT as a Service is the transformation of IT to
a more business-centric approach, focusing
on outcomes such as operational efficiency,
competitiveness and rapid response. This
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means IT shifts from producing IT services
to optimising production and consumption of
Cloud computing
those services in ways consistent with business
requirements. This changes the role of IT from is an approach that
a cost centre to a centre of strategic value.
VMware’s method to help organisations
begin enabling IT as a Service is a three-step
reduces IT complexity
approach:
Step one: Is to begin with virtualisation by leveraging the
and leverage legacy investments. Since
virtualisation is the foundation for cloud
efficient pooling of on-
computing and IT as a Service, the first task
for any organisation transitioning to the cloud
is to virtualise. This allows IT staff to guarantee demand, self-managed
service levels more easily and economically.
Step two: Is to turn the IT department into virtual infrastructure,
an agile and user-friendly internal service
provider. This requires providing IT services
to internal users through Web-based portals consumed as a service.
as a fully automated, catalogue-based
service. In addition, IT staff must offer a new Cloud computing
level of automation to minimise cost and
ensure control and compliance. In order
to effectively manage these increasingly is central to that
dynamic environments VMware offers cloud
infrastructure and management solutions that better strategy and
deliver policy-driven automation and provide IT
management as an intrinsic part of the system
allowing organisations to achieve the efficiency,
virtualisation is the
control and compliance needed to move from
cost centre to service provider. foundation for enabling
Step three: Is to deploy a private cloud. A
private cloud yields improved IT efficiency and
agility while enhancing security and choice.
this transition.”
VMware advocates that deploying a private
cloud on their platform provides a practical
path to the highly scalable, high-performance
public clouds being built by recognised service
providers also leveraging this platform. This
enables organisations to move workloads
between or across private and public cloud
infrastructure allowing them to benefit from the
November / December 2010 : VitAL 63
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elasticity, scalability and security of a hybrid
cloud environment.
“With VMware you have actual control of the
platform. Management tools are inherently part
of the infrastructure.” says Murnane.
Self service
business automation
At the application or service layer, cloud
computing offers a new service consumption
approach that applies standardisation
and automation to enable rapid service
provisioning. By standardising processes,
increasing automation and delivering IT as
a Service, VMware can help drive additional
savings beyond virtualisation, while significantly
reducing the amount of maintenance required
per IT administrator.
Instead of waiting for manual IT procurement
and provisioning processes, organisations
are able to consume services exactly
when they need them. IT organisations can
now deliver standardised IT services on
shared infrastructure through a Web-based
catalogue. By standardising these service
offerings, organisations can simplify many
IT management tasks, from troubleshooting
and patching to change management,
and eliminate much of the administrative
maintenance that burdens the IT team. They
can also automate provisioning through policy-
based workflows that empower validated users
to deploy preconfigured services with the click
of a button. Meanwhile, IT retains control over
policies and billing that govern service usage.
“What we want to achieve is control with
end-to-end automation to allow businesses
to achieve the end state and strategy they are
aiming for,” explains Murnane. “With service
64 VitAL : November / December 2010
management in the cloud we get a higher
level of choice and control. The challenge
is how we migrate the existing infrastructure
and get to the cloud-based operation. How
do we live with this hybrid arrangement?
And how do we make the business
aware of the value and the benefits? These
are the important questions for IT service
managers. IT is currently hugely under-
utilised in most organisations. They need a
well thought out, end-to-end and achievable
way to exploit their IT estate and optimise
its usage. VMware offers the means to
deliver and manage virtualisation and move
to cloud environments. The challenge overall
is to optimise how businesses work.”
Cloud Security
Virtualisation is indispensable for transitioning
legacy applications to new cloud
infrastructures and a critical security enabler
in a cloud environment. VMware provides
the foundation for the next generation of
cloud security to address the challenges
of securing applications and data. With
introspection capabilities that help to
identify hard-to-detect problems and enable
comprehensive security controls, VMware
maintains its capabilities result in better
performance, reduced complexity and more
comprehensive security.
Security policies can be rapidly
implemented and monitored for IT
compliance while maintaining the relevant
levels of control and visibility into ownership
domains. They can make security agile, so
IT staff can leverage dynamic capabilities,
such as live migration, and ensure that
the security policies follow the IT service
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seamlessly. They can also deliver a single,
cost-effective framework for the comprehensive
protection of cloud deployments.
Automation and management
Instead of spending valuable time managing
physical infrastructure or applications,
VMware solutions allow organisations to
focus on innovation and delivering crucial
value to the business. Once all hardware
resources are pooled into virtual building
blocks and service-levels are defined with
associated applications, organisations can
deploy an automation plan based upon
business rules and application needs. Cloud
automation and cloud management drive the
ultimate efficiency in IT, mapping plans and
policies to the business and defining them
within the service delivery mechanism of
the cloud.
“Automation and management rules applied
to the cloud effectively lead to a zero-touch
infrastructure, where IT is available as a service.
IT organisations can also better manage risk
with an approach to cloud computing that
retains the security, control and compliance
that the business demands,” says Murnane.
Interoperability and openness
In addition to serving as a secure foundation
for cloud computing, VMware solutions
ensure application portability between
internal data centres and external hosting
and service provider clouds. This enables
applications to run with little or no modification
internally or externally.
Beyond infrastructure, the platform
allows developers to create portable
cloud applications that further enhance an
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events
organisation’s ability to respond to change.
VMware maintains that IT staff can extend
There has been a gold
this agility to end users by leveraging its
solutions to dynamically provision and rush into virtualisation
manage cloud-ready IT services securely
across multiple devices. with organisations
Pooling and dynamic
resource allocation
retrospectively trying to
The private cloud changes an IT organisation’s
approach to resource management from work out how to deal
discrete hardware to virtualised pools of shared
resources. These shared resource pools with it. The change
are abstracted into logical building blocks
that consist of storage, network and server
units, effectively creating virtual data centres.
has to be managed
Based on business demands, these resource
containers can be constructed to provide properly, and to virtualise
specific service-levels or meet particular
business needs, or they can be divided by
successfully customers
logical business units or functions (for instance,
sales, finance or R&D). By standardising on
a set of well-defined offerings, organisations need a high degree of
can evolve toward a policy-driven approach
to computing. confidence that their
“In this era we have to rely on our platforms
to manage themselves, they have to have
management engineered in,” concludes
infrastructure will be
Murnane. “Having simplified the management
of the infrastructure Service Management managed accordingly.
can be used to abstract the business
requirement from the underlying technology,
forcing IT to focus on what matters – the
business services – regardless of how they are
being delivered and how that delivery changes
over time. Without it, you’ll never make the
transition, never drive automation, and never
measure your successes.” VitAL
www.vmware.com
November / December 2010 : VitAL 65