Predictions by leading research houses such as Datamonitor have shown that the era of IT-as-a-service is on the cusp of realisation, bringing with it a change in the way technology is perceived, built and accessed.
This change marks a new age where all elements of the IT function are requested and provided for as a service. This age or significant paradigm shift is known as IT-as-a-service and is here today.
In the past IT-as-a-service was a term often used to describe IT resources such as software which are accessed as services. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a way of deploying software where a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. Third-party application service providers (ASPs) were the enablers of providing software services.
Although in Europe and SA, ASP promises were not ideally realised among a host of infrastructure and bandwidth challenges, the seeds of IT-as-a-service were firmly sown.
A growing market
For SaaS to be truly viable in SA, it needs to be offered on a global basis, but global bandwidth challenges put the breaks on any growth in this market. However, with undersea cables predicted to be operational this year, the ability to host data centres or call centres or any other service from SA will spur the growth of this market.
Underlying all this is the ability of hosted providers or organisations to have in place the infrastructure to enable and unlock IT-as-a-service. The unveiling of various cloud initiatives by vendors such as VMware, IBM and Microsoft, has firmly set in motion the adoption of IT-as-a-service and virtualisation is clearly in the centre of this shift.
Streamlining service
IT-as-a-service-enables enterprises to focus on their business needs and not what technology can do for them. IT-as-a-service allows the organisation to align its IT functions with the businesses strategic goals.
IT-as-a-service allows the organisation to align its IT functions with the businesses strategic goals.
Chris Norton is regional director of VMware SA.
Virtualisation creates a shared pool of storage, network and computer resources which can be dynamically shared, allocated and migrated easily, quickly and securely. This pooling of resources has clear benefits for organisations such as: simplified management; reduction of overall deployment time; centralised and controlled security; management of downtime; higher hardware utilisation; easier service ability with greater application flexibility; the ability to automate and simplify provisioning and the provision of better service levels to applications at a lower cost.
The vision of virtualisation is to provide flexible IT services that respond to changing business conditions and eliminate downtime while remaining in compliance by increasing automation in the data centre.
Mature virtualisation technologies have the ability to provide virtual infrastructure stacks to the organisation which are accompanied by service level agreements (SLA), all as a service. Now anybody within the organisation has the ability to ask for a specific server with a certain SLA and within minutes it is available - they do not have to worry about the hardware or building the infrastructure.
However, this easy provisioning is not without its challenges. Because IT becomes so easy to provision it can lead to over provisioning, and organisations need a set of tools to provision, manage and stop server sprawl. There are many mature automatic provisioning and management tools widely available on the market today.
In addition, tools are also becoming available which allow for easy billing/chargeback and the ability to raise invoices when providing IT-as-a-service.
* Chris Norton is regional director of VMware SA.
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