In the cloud era, IT has been defined by the ability to deliver key components as a service, including software, platform and infrastructure. It’s no surprise that the latest development in this trend has been IT as a service (ITaaS), a new delivery model that allows organizations to quickly and easily add capabilities from across the IT landscape as needed, using virtualization technology, service catalogs, and predefined delivery models.
If you’re looking for a way to help your IT organization keep up with the rapidly increasing demands placed upon it, ITaaS might be the right option for you. Read this post to get a brief introduction to ITaaS, including what it is, how it can benefit an organization such as yours, and why right now might be the optimal time to implement it.
Why IT as a Service?
In the past, IT teams were responsible for making sure the business had all the technology capabilities and services it needed to be successful. This usually meant making large-scale investments in traditional IT infrastructure. These investments often required the organization to put up a huge amount of capital up front, and could take so long to complete that they would basically be obsolete by the time they were ready to use.
As a result, IT’s role as a value driver within the organization was very limited. The team would spend most of its time chasing after the latest and greatest thing the business needed, and very little time thinking about how it could organize its services into an integrated source of business value.
Now, this no longer has to be the case. IT as a service allows IT teams to scale services on demand and increase agility, ensuring that the business is always able to get the technology and services it needs, right when it needs it. As a result, IT is now empowered to create an end-to-end platform that does away with silos, ensures compliance with corporate security standards, makes the most efficient use of resources, and supports better business decision making through easy access to business data.
Why now?
While increased agility and scalability have always been important benefits for IT, these benefits have now gone from being nice to have to being absolutely essential. We are living in an era defined by constant and irrevocable business change. IT organizations that continue to rely on the old way of doing things—identifying a business goal, and then trying to implement a traditional infrastructure upgrade to meet that goal—simply won’t be able to keep up in today’s fast-paced business world.
We are also living in a world that is increasingly influenced by new technologies such as cloud computing, virtualization, and DevOps. In order to be successful in this new business world, IT teams need to implement an infrastructure that can help the business best take advantage of these new offerings. Once again, IT as a service meets this need. For instance, organizations will find that the ITaaS model supports a perfect platform for hybrid cloud. ITaaS can easily move its virtualized server workloads back and forth between public and private clouds, allowing organizations to make the most of each for specific situations.
Finally, ITaaS offers the ability to transform the role IT plays within the organization at just the right time. The consumerization of technology leads business users to expect access to the technology they want, right when they want it. Through the use of automation and self-service tools, an ITaaS environment ensures that users can always get what they need quickly, removing the need for them to engage in risky “shadow IT” behavior just to get the tools and capabilities they need.
Final Thoughts
Does the idea of increased flexibility, scalability and agility in your IT environment sound appealing to you? We thought it might. Read the white paper, IT as a Service: An Information Technology Approach, to get a closer look at ITaaS, the technology that's involved with the ITaaS model, and the steps you can take to get started with making the most of ITaaS in your organization.
