By Andy Kicklighter

IT departments in enterprises are under pressure to accurately convey the value that they're providing in today's highly flexible and elastic technology environments. The past five years alone have seen a boom in a number of important variables including the number and intensity of applications, the growth in virtual and physical devices both on the premises, in the cloud, and mixed; and the proliferation of mobile devices of the smart and "other" category, and more.

As examples of how IT environments are driven to meet the flexible—almost elastic—needs of the enterprise, we're seeing that IT applications and servers are increasingly made available on an as-needed basis; they're then provisioned on demand, used and retired. This happens regularly in both virtualized and physical environments and within private clouds. There are three main parts to the solution of how to demonstrate concrete business value from real-time IT monitoring. The challenge is to clearly convey how IT departments can show real value.

STEP ONE - Granular, detailed measurement of usage

- You will need to understand the infrastructure and applications' usage details, as well as the usage of your monitoring environment. Details can include server, application, network and transaction usage, as well as performance against SLAs.

- Be sure the data is accessible and that clear reporting is possible. For the IT team (enterprise) or the customer or end user (service provider), overall usage and trending details should be available online and in email-deliverable format.

- Automated starting and stopping of metering should be configured so that as virtual and physical systems and devices come on-line or are decommissioned, powered down or removed from use, the activity is automatically reflected and reported.

- As actual usage varies, that usage should be reflected in customizable, real-time displays.

STEP TWO - Mapping of that usage to a business model (mediation)

- For cloud providers, mapping this usage to the unique SaaS, PaaS or IaaS business models makes service differentiation a possibility, and it opens the door to new approaches to existing markets.

- For service providers, a key advantage can be a business model tailored to the market being addressed. Directly aligning costs with the revenues from managing on-site customer services as well as cloud-based applications can allow for new, higher-value business offerings and also directly enable services and usage-based billing of the customer.

STEP THREE - Integration with existing services and applications

- For their part, enterprises need the capability to accurately map actual usage to their internal billing models—to compute credits, account for maximum use of space, number of devices used, the number of users per application and the like. The challenge is that most enterprises are not yet able to employ full internal chargeback capability; the first step is typically to be able report and display information in the format that the internal customer finds useful – internal application usage, and the underlying services, network and storage use. This reporting allows the IT team to put a real value on what they are delivering to the business, even when the deeper integration to financial applications is not present. For this reporting to be both practical and useful, real-time, instant views as well as reports accessible online and by email should be possible and easy to fully control.

- Visibility into current and real-time usage in a highly variable IT environment reduces the exposure to the "teenager with the cell phone and 3,000 text messages" issue, where after the "damage" is done you are hit with an unexpectedly high bill. With real-time integration, you get visibility into usage rates, and can accurately limit the exposure to services as they are provided rather than after the fact.

- Examples of this seamless integration can be seen with industry implementations of Aria and Salesforce.com, and their ability to support whatever business model a cloud provider or service provider requires, and to implement easily and in an automated way.

- For large enterprises, Oracle applications or SAP integration can provide similar, limited exposure for enterprises that have moved to a full chargeback model internally.

Putting the Plan into Action

Implementations of virtualization, cloud-based services and private clouds are widespread and growing quickly, and we have reviewed some benefits and potential challenges for enterprises and service providers moving down this road. As we've seen, one of the keys to ensuring a successful IT implementation is to be able to monitor and tie real-time IT infrastructure usage metrics to actual cost and ultimately, the business benefits delivered. IT departments in enterprises, for their part, are under constant pressure to justify the cost of technology solutions, while service providers need to keep a close watch on costs while accurately billing for services rendered.

With these points taken into consideration, and to meet their often-stringent needs, organizations are shifting toward more real-time methods of monitoring and either paying or billing for IT. The model is almost the next step beyond the subscription model - a commitment to pay for only the resources you actually use - hardware, software or other.

Andy Kicklighter is a Senior Technical Marketing Manager – Cloud, at Nimsoft.

Print Article

How can you avoid making major mistakes when operating and maintaining your data center? The key lies in the methodology behind your operations and maintenance program.

Read more

Many organizations are considering use of hybrid cloud storage solutions, cloud storage gateways, or cloud storage on-ramps to help address cost associated with deploying storage to satisfy the never-ending hunger of today's users and applications. However, most do not know when a hybrid cloud storage solution makes sense.

Read more