My role at TESM focuses on our Cloud Management and Governance services and products. The goal of all of us working at TESM is to help customers realise maximum return on their investment in ServiceNow.
As a company, we are extremely successful at levering our ServiceNow expertise and real-world experience to ensure that the “traditional” capabilities of ServiceNow around ITSM and associated disciplines are fully exploited by our customers. Almost without exception, those same ServiceNow ITSM customers are also faced with the additional challenge of embracing the constantly evolving models for IT supply and operations provided by Cloud infrastructure services.
Embracing Cloud services (e.g.: AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.) is by no means purely a technical challenge. Indeed, it could be argued that as Cloud services become more and more functionally rich, the technical elements are the easy ones. Much bigger challenges can be faced in addressing the operational and commercial considerations around Cloud services.
The attractions of Cloud services are clear – flexibility, agility, elasticity, rapid supply, self-service, consumption-based pricing, etc. However, these same attractions represent challenges to established and required governance processes and procedures.
If you are a developer, you want IT capacity and capability when you need it, with no delay – and, ideally, you’d like it to be the latest and greatest. You would also like to able to manage it yourself, without any of that “infrastructure inertia” getting in the way.
If you are on the IT supply or support side of the house, then you’re responsible for adherence to standards, security, compliance and possibly financial management as well. To meet these responsibilities, you have to establish and implement appropriate governance and controls.
So, essentially, the aggregate of these requirements is that IT supply from Cloud services needs to be fast, cheap and secure. Easy eh? Particularly when you consider that the likelihood is that the developer’s view of the IT governance is that it represents bureaucracy – and the IT guy’s view of the characteristics of Cloud services is that it has the danger of facilitating total anarchy.
In reality, with an appropriate approach that addresses People, Process and Technology across the three dimensions of Technical, Commercial and Operational, it is completely possible to deliver IT Cloud Services in an optimal manner that delivers the required technical performance and functionality, realises the commercial benefits of Cloud and ensures that you remain operationally compliant.
So back to TESM and ServiceNow, and how we can help:
As well as our proven capabilities around ServiceNow, many of the team here at TESM have multi-decade experience in architecting, engineering, supporting, managing and operating IT infrastructure solutions in the most demanding of environments.
As part of their IT Operation Management product set, ServiceNow now delivers a capability to manage your Cloud platform. Appropriately it’s called the Cloud Management Platform (CMP) and is delivered as a plugin – fully integrated with the core ServiceNow product.
I hope that I’ve helped you understand that with ServiceNow, including the CMP plugin, you can indeed address the seemingly conflicting requirements that Cloud infrastructure services and effective ITSM governance present.
In subsequent posts we will provide more colour and detail on how you can accelerate your own journey to the cloud, and stay safe at the same time.
