銆?/span>51CTO.comComprehensive Report銆?/span>Even a torrential downpour cannot extinguish the fervor surrounding cloud computing. Many enterprises in China are actively developing cloud computing, busily preparing their data center upgrades, virtual architectures, and cloud initiatives. The same holds true for concepts like BSM鈥攖he benefits have been discussed thoroughly enough. We are well aware that these technologies can help businesses become more efficient and cost-effective, but few have given sufficient thought to the resulting challenge: how to manage increasingly complex IT systems to achieve these “hot” goals.
Achieving balance between the high virtual machine density of cloud computing and the flexibility of IT infrastructure management is critical. Without effective management capabilities and tight business collaboration, cloud computing risks devolving into a “fragmented” solution with exorbitant deployment and maintenance costs and extremely complex processes. To avoid this scenario, IT operations vendors led by Betasoft have launched close collaborations with customers and upstream cloud computing product vendors. Their goal is to solidify IT infrastructure management as a stepping stone toward the ultimate goal of BSM, helping enterprises progressively transform their data center operating environments from static, passive, and manual ones into flexible, proactive, and highly automated cloud environments.
Rejecting the “Bubble”
Zhang Meng, CTO of a Fortune 500 company’s production and logistics hub in Dalian, has nearly 15 years of experience, giving him a deep understanding of the “art” of IT management. He states: “From my first exposure to ITIL and BSM to being able to consider things from a business perspective and effectively leverage existing IT resources to integrate everything, it took me five years. But now, managing the company’s established private cloud data center is much more complex than before. From edge servers to the proliferation of core business virtual machines, the entire IT infrastructure is crisscrossed with multiple business lines, posing new challenges for the department’s IT service management. For example, IT issues that were once easy to detect are now far more complex to diagnose due to extensive virtualization. If this problem isn’t solved promptly, my worries about the future of cloud computing will only deepen.” Like Zhang Meng, many technical directors face similar issues. Some even worry that if supporting management cannot keep pace, cloud computing might become a repeat of the Internet bubble era.
Cloud management is a path that has “led countless heroes to bow in defeat.” We know that cloud computing platforms dynamically provide users with resource access and utilization; the cloud model achieves resource scheduling flexibility and embodies on-demand availability. So, if they are to implement cloud computing, will more enterprises consider how to tackle the IT management challenges of such a dynamic structure?
Renowned market analysis firm Forrester Research explicitly states in its report “The Benefits of Internal Cloud Implementation”: “Many enterprise architecture and operations experts are beginning to adopt this ‘cloud computing’ concept and build their own internal clouds…… Although cloud computing is flashy, taking action that bypasses IT operations can be dangerous.” Similarly, Gartner has repeatedly stated: “When BSM is fully integrated with cloud computing, it can help them deliver tiered service levels to different cloud clients in a timely manner and manage them effectively, enabling coordination, provisioning, service change, monitoring, and management automation for cloud computing. As internal and external clouds become widespread, BSM can establish a unified, actionable service catalog for internal and external IT services, service-level federation agreements, and costs. Therefore, for any enterprise providing cloud computing services, BSM will become an indispensable tool.”
From this, we can see that Business Service Management (BSM) is a system that dynamically integrates business considerations and establishes links between IT services and foundational IT infrastructure. Facing the surging tide of cloud computing, enterprises should take a strategic, forward-looking perspective and build an integrated management system based on a dynamic BSM architecture. This will equip them with the business service management capabilities needed for future private, public, and hybrid clouds, providing a solid basis for managing cloud platforms after their implementation. In other words, BSM primarily emphasizes the dynamic nature of business. Operating and maintaining an enterprise’s IT systems from this viewpoint aligns with the goals of cloud computing, allowing IT to maximize its effectiveness and drive business forward. Therefore, ensuring BSM takes root before the cloud does is the core of the operations challenge.”
IT Infrastructure Management Is the Prerequisite
BSM enables IT to readily meet business demands, transforming the enterprise environment so that business and IT leaders can share a common language, confront challenges through a unified interface, and understand the impact of new changes. The formation of this unified landscape will make IT system operations shine even brighter amidst the tides of cloud computing and virtualization.
However, innovations in IT have caused the objects of management to undergo various evolutionary changes. From single network management and managing individual IT components, to system application management and business-service-oriented management, enterprises gradually realized that infrastructure should not just be considered as specific hardware, but needs to be treated as a service. As a higher-level concept, BSM is not only about standardizing and streamlining IT service management but also about accelerating the convergence of IT and business. Yet, while the concept of BSM is easy to describe, effectively integrating BSM with an enterprise’s core business is far from simple. We must solve the problem of BSM implementation effectively; otherwise, IT departments in cloud computing environments risk being reduced to ‘cloud slaves’.
Through tracking surveys, we observed a seeming decline in the domestic IT service management market craze in 2010. Data shows that many Chinese enterprises experienced discomfort and confusion when experimenting with IT service management. The blind pursuit of standardization led 90% of enterprises attempting ITIL and BSM to be pushed onto a path of failure by various obstacles. This directly causes many enterprises to doubt or even reject IT service management and, to some extent, hampers the progress of IT service management in new architectures like cloud computing. Those with failed experiences lament and realize: “BSM cannot be achieved overnight; its realization requires a certain foundation.” While some IT department heads easily grasp that virtualization practices must precede cloud computing, they remain confused about BSM, not understanding that the primary prerequisite is establishing a comprehensive IT infrastructure management platform. Errors in subjective judgment directly lead to the failure of these projects.
Reversing the Situation Requires Down-to-Earth Pragmatism
Summarizing the analysis above, we