Making the change from traditional IT infrastructure to a Cloud based model can be a leap of faith. For many IT managers, it can be a case of filing it in the ‘too-hard’ basket. However, moving to the Cloud means you can move away from large Capex budgets and teams who manage, oversee, upgrade and service on premises equipment, and instead focus on growing your business.

Modern Service Management provides a framework to have that conversation about the future of your IT systems, and covers 6 main points:

1. Reclaiming IT’s role as a strategic adviser
2. Compliance
3. Cost
4. Customer Service
5. Maintaining Momentum
6. Incident Management

1. Strategic Adviser 

Traditionally, businesses would employ IT service providers to acquire necessary hardware and software to build on-premises infrastructure. These service providers were keep busy assembling, managing and servicing these systems. However, as we have moved into the ‘Cloud-age’, businesses can more easily access a wide variety of cloud services and piece them together – without the need to engage these traditional service providers.

This ever-increasing demand for Cloud services is creating an opportunity for IT providers to reclaim their role as strategic advisers, helping businesses navigate the complex array of available services.

A modern Service Management approach is about taking you IT operations from simply delivering technology, and instead delivering service. 

2. Security & Compliance

It infrastructure can only be as strong as it’s foundations – and this remains true when moving to the Cloud. But if you get the fundamentals right, then once your migration is complete, risk mitigation will be part and parcel of your new operating environment.

At Umbrellar, we deploy best of breed services, including the Azure Virtual Datacentre (AVD) model. This is designed to make the most of Azure Cloud platforms capabilities while respecting your existing security and networking policies. Within the AVD model, you can apply isolation policies, making the Cloud more like the physical datacentres you know, and achieving the levels of trust that you need.

3. Controlling Costs

Cost is often one of the major factors in making the move to Cloud-based services. With Cloud, you no longer need to buy and maintain expensive hardware.

With Cloud and consumption based rates,your budget moves from capex to opex. This helps your business to drive predictability, forecast usage and manage current usage appropriately. Instead of managing inputs, your business can focus on deliverables and outcomes.

4. Customer Service

Cloud services provide a whole new approach to customer service. Key to this is good Service Level Management agreements. This provides continual identification, monitoring and review of the level of IT services specified in service level agreements.

Azure offers highly standardised services, and SLAs are predefined for all consumers, with these metrics used to underpin the business user experience of the service.

5. Maintaining Momentum

Change management is more about monitoring communicating and reacting to changes, as changes are usually smaller in scope and impact, but much greater in number in a cloud environment.

the modern approach to change management is to drive these smaller changes through the Release Pipeline, where change schedules are known, and mitigation and risk controls are engineered into the change operations.

Release and deployment models are patterns enabled by Cloud services are a dramatic change from the heavily manual and slow releases of old.

6. Incident Management

After a company moves to Cloud-based services, incidents and their management will change drastically.

The modern approach to incident management recognises the that traditional process is inefficient, in both human resource and speed to resolution. Using a modern balanced, metrics-driven approach are key to ensuring you can make the right changes.

Whilst the reality of delivering a service is that incidents will happen, the question in most cases is how we respond to incidents. Every incident should be treated as an opportunity to build trust and learn something about the systems we deploy, so to see how we can better offer service to our end users.