The IT market is continuing to change at lightning speed as technology evolves and global economic challenges force organizations to review IT service delivery strategies. It used to be so easy – we owned our data center with our carefully selected IT stored within it, everything local and under one roof. But as technology has evolved, so has our view of the delivery of IT infrastructure services, and the message that goes with this is not always clear.

Today, business managers are asking their IT professionals about the marketing promise of cloud computing and alternate sourcing. And as current global external pressures have a major influence on business decisions, senior management is continuing to focus its attention on areas of high cost, with IT near the top in all cases.

A move to the cloud
Some organizations have already taken the first leap by migrating their IT services to offsite specialist managed service facilities and have recognized the benefits that this alone brings. But today the number of options available for the delivery of IT services is much greater, with maturity in the market bringing greater acceptance. But how far do you leap and what does this mean for your organization?

The options available will depend greatly on the organization’s appetite for accepting perceived risk. Making any change to an organization’s IT brings some form of business risk, but making no change at all may bring greater risks as legacy infrastructure is unable to cope with more complex IT solutions.

Proactively developing a strategy and roadmap that addresses the need to support change to meet increasing risks and costs is a positive approach that takes the initiative forward in a more controlled way.

The safest and most mature of the options – and possibly the one requiring the biggest leap – is to reduce the risk of aged and unsuitable data center facilities by moving the IT systems into a modern colocation facility provided as a service on a flexible rental basis. These can be dedicated (non-shared) facilities or the more traditional shared ones. One of the biggest benefits of this approach is the migration itself, as moving each IT service enables the migration team to clearly understand and document the risks and the build of each service. It is surprising how much IT infrastructure is left behind after.

When we progress up the Cloud stack we can see that the delivery of private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is becoming increasingly popular; a more dedicated IT infrastructure either delivered as a private logical network or more commonly as a physically separate network and infrastructure. Larger organizations consider the physical private cloud service as the most acceptable solution to using cloud services because it eliminates many of the security concerns raised by risk and security officers, while bringing benefits of a fully outsourced infrastructure supplied and managed by a specialist organization under an agreed level of service.

For cash-strapped organizations, or those with low risk and security requirements, where service levels are less critical (ie, test and development environments), shared public cloud is a strong option. The ability to quickly turn up an infrastructure to meet the needs of a short-lived service and shut it down when finished is of great benefit.

It is clear that the decisions on what is best for your organization will be driven by the acceptability of risk, business reputation and cost. There is no doubt that the higher you go up the Cloud stack of services – where systems are shared and economies of scale can be recognized – the greater the cost savings that can be achieved.

The selection of services in future may not, however, be as straightforward as selecting a single outsourcing service provider. Business requirements will vary between and within organizations with the outsourced model selected, dictating a sourcing solution from a variety of providers. The future landscape may therefore be a hybrid of services that are sourced selectively. This challenges today’s IT management to modify their organizational governance structure from managing an internal team delivering IT services to managing multiple IT service providers that, when combined, provide the organization’s suite of business IT services.

The IT manager’s future
Too often I see IT managers who, having outsourced all or part of their services, consider any problems that arise to be the responsibility of the service providers. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. IT management still maintains responsibility for the service and must manage its partner effectively. A hands-off approach will only lead to a degraded service, resulting in future failures, with fingers pointing at the IT manager.

This situation can be eradicated easily by following some very simple rules.

RULE 1 – Develop a simple strategy for approaching the sourcing exercise and develop clear boundaries for the service you wish to source. Take a step back and review your objectives. Are you looking for a safe option, where your data center services can grow with your services? If this is critical, then the selection of potential suppliers may be different from those that deliver just data center services. Make sure your potential supplier is able to grow with you – remember many data center providers are partnering with specialist cloud providers that may meet future requirements. So be sure to ask which services the data center service provider can deliver, but also who they are partnering with to deliver the next wave of cloud-based IT technology.

RULE 2 – Ensure you capture current key data, the services you deliver to your customers, the number of IT devices you currently support, and the type of server and storage device you use today. Your potential supplier will look to this information to initially determine the potential service they are able to deliver to you, even if this may change greatly once you install into the new facility.

Also focus the outsourcing opportunity on the requirements of the business. We can all become too focused on the small piece in which we are specialists, be it data center engineering or servers. Take a step back and ask the basic questions:

•             What levels of services does the customer need? 

•             Does the customer need contingency for service failure?

•             Are there any data compliance requirements?

By confirming a few basic answers the potential service delivery options can become a lot clearer and you will be a long way to understanding the greater opportunity.

RULE 3 – Don’t consider this as another procurement exercise. Letting the procurement/purchasing department own and run this exercise will force a decision to be made on price alone. Take a step back and consider all of your requirements. There is no one service that fits all needs, as much as the major players in the market tell us otherwise. Ensure you develop a comprehensive specification and request for proposal that asks the right questions to clearly understand whether the service provider is right for you.

RULE 4 – Modify the governance structure of your IT organization. As future services are sourced from third-party service providers, the shape and makeup of the IT organization will need to change. Staff who traditionally undertook the operational delivery of services may move with their job or will undertake new roles created as a result of the change. New opportunities will arise as there will be a greater need to manage the service providers, integrate the organization’s operational processes with those of third parties and monitor control points for service degradation and capacity pinch points.

In essence, the governance team will be responsible for ensuring that the service providers meet their service objectives and service agreement and, where business demands dictate, that service agreements are modified to accommodate new requirements.

RULE 5 – When agreeing service levels, ensure that they are fair and achievable. Reducing the number of service levels monitored to focus purely on those areas will go a long way to helping the new IT governance team ensure services are meeting the needs of the business. A good service level agreement (SLA) will be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Aligned, Relevant and Timely).

When constructing the SLA, try to keep the legal terms and conditions separate from the service schedules and the SLA. (It is not always possible to separate them entirely as service levels will have some relationship with elements of contractual ‘breach of contract’.)

As the contract is constructed, keep reminding all in the agreement cycle that this is an operational document, and that while the legal elements need to protect the organization, the document still needs to have room to modify service schedules that will become the norm as the business’s needs dictate. Do not underestimate how long the contract will take; I would certainly recommend, wherever possible, to engage specialist IT legal support for this function.

RULE 6 – As the service is implemented there will be much change as the team and the business stabilizes and services become the norm. The future objective for both organization and service providers will be to ensure that discussions are not about historical issues but about developing the service. Through your carefully selected partner you now have the opportunity to:

•             evolve your services and improve their robustness;

•             understand new compliance requirements;

•             reduce risks of service outage;

•             improve data management;

•             improve levels and agility of service; and

•             reduce costs.

Whatever is important to your organization, now is the time to develop discussions and modify your strategy. Your journey from traditional IT service delivery to new cloud services will be a journey of highs and lows. Trying to do this alone will only lead to disappointment, so ensure you bring on-board expertise and knowledge of the opportunities and marketplace.

It will be clear that discussing your potential needs with service providers will bring with it a whole new band of ‘best friends’. What is key to you at this stage is an understanding of the marketplace, the opportunities this market can bring and the potential minefield you will need to navigate successfully. Speak to your peers and learn from their successes and mistakes, and bring on-board an in-house advisor who can provide you with the direction.

We seem to be bombarded by advertising that shows us a journey to a wondrous world, where the grass seems greener. Rest assured there will be no gain without some pain, one way or another.

This article first appeared in FOCUS, issue 28, in our special on Cloud and Colocation. You can read more in our digital edition here. FOCUS 29 will be out next week. The newest edition sees FOCUS visit CERN, speak with GE about big data, get the latest on Microsoft’s data center efforts and dig into the industry’s storage efforts around big data.